Microcosmic

"The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." "The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." The word ‘magic’ can mean several things. A common way in which it’s used is to express the idea of conjuring - pulling the proverbial rabbit out of a hat. Bringing something into existence that didn’t exist before. There’ll be a range of beliefs about this. From it being merely sleight of hand, done for entertainment purposes, to it being a literal act of creation with the use of special powers. In whichever way it's thought of, ‘magic’ usually conveys ideas of mystery and wonder. What is art? If you write a poem, paint a picture, compose a song, you are literally bringing something into the world that wasn’t there before. What’s more this creation may well have ‘special powers’. The ability to strongly affect people, to move them - even change their lives. You are performing a kind of magic...

Dandlion seedhead and sparkler seeds radiating from the center - sparks radiating from the center While attempting to organise my unwieldy, burgeoning collection of photographs from the patch I kept noticing something. My brain was continually making connections – "that lichen looks like cracked mud, that flock of birds resembles smoke, there's a face on that tree". Why do things in nature often look like other, completely unrelated, things in nature? The answer to this points to a regularity, order and unity in nature...and to patterns. Grain of an Oak tree and my thumb print Patterns in nature are visible regularities of form - similar patterns appear again and again in  different contexts - in both living and non living things. Why is this? I think there are three overlapping kinds of explanation. 1) Laws of nature - nature has no choice – it has to obey the physical laws of the universe. So a bubble is the shape it is because surface tension pul...