Words have such an incredible grip on us — What are they really and what can non-verbal languages tell us about meaningful communication?

Like my horse Molly, who doesn’t have access to this specific ability to articulate that our prefrontal cortex allows for us, but that doesn’t get in the way of our conversations

In fact, it’s normally my brain, which is apparently so much more powerful than hers, that gets in the way.

Are the creatures of this Earth holding a secret that we can’t hear because we’re too busy shouting at each other just for the sake of hearing our own voices? Is music carrying a hidden message that we haven’t tuned ourselves to receive?

In the age of AI, will we still turn to words to help us, or is there a saviour waiting to be known beneath them? . . .

Why are creative people almost always so low in self confidence? Can’t they see how amazing their creations are? Depression hits musicians and artists really hard. Don’t they see how cool we all think they are?

There is art inside galleries that shocks people when they read the price. Museums of historic art are holding literally billions of dollars of this particular medium. It’s valuable alright.

But the art and the artist are two separate things and don’t they know it.

Artists who have produced insanely beautiful works that were even, for some, highly successful while they were still living, still battled with extremely low self confidence.

Tchaikovsky, Hemingway, Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Cobain all struggled with heavy depression throughout their lives. . . .

As a species we’re anxious to close gap between things.

Money, love, loyalty, success, the house, the vehicle, status, security. The clothes and books, the comfort and purpose. All can be held close or kept far from us. It frustrates us to seperate from them but when we do finally hold these things in our grasp, our attention biases us towards what is still afar.

What is it about that distance that irks us so much? Is there something that distance can show us?

Reading Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Master and His Emissary, has shown me how the brains hemispheres see the world. It is the evolution of the frontal lobes that give us this ability to stand back from the immediacy of our world, look at what we don’t have and then make a plan to get it.

But there are two fundamentally different ways of going about that.

A left hemisphere approach — reaching out to grab — and a right hemisphere approach — standing back to witness context . . .

The psychology of the straight line

“We have made the straight line our god. But it is a dead god.”
– Friedensreich Hundertwasser

The straight line exists in places where our mind has grasped for control at the expense of aliveness. The straight line is the human attempt at containing nature. The straight line is always accompanied by a mindset of control and manipulation.

In Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s account of hemisphere theory, the left hemisphere pays attention to the world in a specific way – distinct from its right counterpart – that filters everything into linearity.

“The left hemisphere sees things in parts, abstracted from context. It sees a fixed point as opposed to a flowing continuity. It prioritises things it can grab and use, as well as things that are mechanical.”
– The Master and His Emissary

When looking onto a scene – left hemispheric mediated attention will see what it knows, what it can grip onto in order so that it can use it for its own purposes of building and manipulating. . .

The real meaning of ‘seeing’

“Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way.”
― Dr. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Now, if you are young or in your first season of photography, you definitely won’t be seeing it as it is. Seeing a scene as it is in front of you takes a certain quality and depth of attention that just takes time to consciously develop.

I don’t even see reality as it really is in wholeness. No one does.

It is more an attitude we can adopt: wishing, hoping, desiring to see it as it is, which means allowing it to be as it is . . .

What are Automatic Responses?

We learn lessons very early on that stick with us unconsciously and inform our automatic responses. Their nature being so automatic, they can be hard to catch, difficult to notice.

Our system knows to withdraw our hand very quickly from a hot element to save us from getting hurt, but we got hurt from more than just a hot element, didn’t we?

Being punished or ignored, for just being naturally you, hurt!

“Ouch, I’ll remember that for next time.”

Any of these fears will shut us off to certain elements, experiences and sensations. We forget that we have the option to go that way . . .

With such a complex world that throws so many novel experiences at us, it isn’t as simple as responding as predator or prey animal for humans.

This is where stories come in.

Some of the fairytales that we still know and love today, Like Beauty and the Beast, date back as far as 4000 years according to researchers. Others, such as the Smith and the Devil date back to the Bronze age, around 6000 years old!

Stories are a remarkable format that humans employ to pass down valuable information through the generations like how to conquer evil and battle through hardship . . .