Deep time

One of the skills you develop in the nature awareness movement is ‘wide angled vision’. Try it now (ideally outdoors). Stretch out your arms and raise your hands to either side of your head (maybe wiggle your fingers), keeping them both in your eyesight at the same time. Now, when you’ve got used to that, focus on something near you at the same time as something a few metres away. Hold that gaze. You might find that not only your vision expands but your whole awareness too. That’s how animals see things, all the time. This soft, relaxed gaze means they are aware of the slightest movement all around them. The details fade away but the whole intensifies. In humans it induces an ‘alpha wave’ brain function, which is associated with being at ease. It’s the state we enter unconsciously when in nature, in love or in the flow. 

Contrast this with the normal beta wave state of mind of most of us when reading books, working on the computer or any one of our focused activities. We’re overloaded with information. And yet in this focused state, we can miss a lot of peripheral signals. Maybe because we’re in this state most of the time, we’re missing the big picture.  

The big picture being what Peter Lipman described so well in his blog. It’s real. The evidence is there, in our media, in our daily lives. Yesterday was the hottest October day on record in the UK. The cost of filling our community car is going up. Our income is going down.

And yet we remain focused on what’s in front of our noses. The latest news drama. The deadlines we have to meet. The shopping list. The constant stimulation and to-dos distract us from the big picture. 

The big picture context of what we’re transitioning to is actually the big world we live in, the one planet, where I have a sister in Kenya and the Brazilian rainforest is my back garden, where every little action of mine has a butterfly effect. Where do I bank? What’s my carbon footprint? Am I active in my community? Where does my water come from? What goes into my mouth and where did it originate? These questions can lead to transition answers, starting with the personal and radiating outwards through our communities.

The big picture, for me, is about deep space and, as Joanna Macy writes, deep time too, where we are listening to our fellow beings and ancestors of all species, and we are learning from our great grandchildren. Sometimes I walk down my street and I might be a hundred years ago with the smoke of the coal fires in my nose. Two hundred, and I’m on a rough path along the old castle walls. In a hundred years I’m surrounded by urban orchards and blackbird song.

This might seem surreal, but I also feel like I’m starting to act my age, becoming more real.

Photos: group brush shelter, Lewes New School children on a Trackways course, the first fire I made from friction