the limping shrink

https://stocksnap.io/photo/dark-room-X4L0SO1PM1 Copyright James Stamler (public domain) At some time in the deepest part of my sleep I wake to the mattress movements of A getting into bed beside me. I'm aware of a slow crackling sound from somewhere on his side of the bed, accelerating rapidly as I listen. He throws an arm into the air with a shout, 'Ahhhgh' and swats whatever is making the sound to the floor. 'What was that?!' 'Ghhhh.' I can feel in my stomach the fear of the worst (fire) and the hunger to know, which I would usually immediately satisfy in whatever way possible. But A's complacent return to sleep-breathing suggests that we aren't in immediate danger.  As I am in a year of letting go I see the situation as a relatively easy opportunity not to resolve my question too quickly. I will refuse to satisfy my mind, and see what happens.  I'm one of those people who has to have a reason for everything. If I can't find a real one I...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soles_of_a_Males_Feet.jpg The London sky is empty of cloud and the warmth of the sun has dissipated into space, leaving the temperature low enough to give a fringe of chill to my toes. I sit at my desk and prepare to do a bodyscan meditation.  I have decided, despite knowing that typing and using words will be a great interference to it, to try to describe the experience here on the computer in the moment as I do it. I don't know if it will work at all, but I am giving it a try. Because, well, because that seems like an interesting idea right now.  This is a mindfulness practice, so the purpose is not to empty my mind, but to exercise the awareness of where my focus is, and to return it to the progress through the body sensations whenever it diverges from that. However many times that happens. I plan to drop my attention onto different parts of my body all the way down from the top of the head to my toes. And to start a new paragraph whe...

With grateful thanks to  the source of this wonderful photo  for sharing it on creative commons licence Single-celled organisms like this paramecium, if you look at them down a microscope they look just like the diagrams. The whole structure is laid out transparently for you to see. This is amazing to me because I usually think of diagrams as simplifications of what's actually there. But in the case of these very lively little creatures, what's there is marvellously simple. And if they're alive when you're looking at them, you are struck by how very fast their  movements are. All those cilia, orchestrated in an elegant Mexican wave every few milliseconds.  Cilia are made of an arrangement of tiny tubules linked together by dynein protein molecules. Whenever one of these protein molecules is able to gain energy from ATP molecules floating around in the cell, it changes shape, bends on itself and crawls up one of the microtubules. This bends the whole cilium. Because o...

Distorted Link to source Today the sky is covered in an uneven grey padding, muffling the light. The tops of the trees are struggling in the wind. Yesterday when I woke late the blue was rich and clear, with the February sun strong enough to warm the floor.  The blue is an illusion, isn't it, the effect of the white light from the sun bending through the prism of the atmosphere. Blue bends best and that's why it reaches our eyes.  The earth's atomosphere is the lens between the sun and our eyes that register it as blue and our minds that add the harmonics and associations of summer, of beauty, of joy. Without the atmosphere the sky would be white. Without our eyes it wouldn't be any colour at all. Without our minds it would be meaningless. Distorting lens Yesterday I went to the opticians to have one of the lenses taken out of my spectacles. Since the cataract operation I have a new lens inside my eye, so I don't need a lens outside my eye any more. Well, at least n...

Black hole-triggered star formation https://www.flickr.com/photos/24354425@N03/49236387136 Saved under creative commons licence  Today is the day of my second eye operation. To exchange an artificial lens for the cataract problem brought on by my first eye operation. It's cold today at 6 am, even in the layers I've put on for the occasion. And the operation's in Croydon, the scene of my last decade of work.  In my mind's eye that work is represented by a huge square concrete office building, where my team now work in open-plan air-conditioned spaces. When I worked there, my clinic was in fact based in the 'boys' end of an old brick and stone school with an unchallenged buddleia undermining its outer wall. There was a carpark full of trash blown in from the tram station outside.  Nick, my first boss there, took down a mentally ill man who had already stabbed one person in the car park and was well on his way to stabbing more on the tram station. The memory stands...