'True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew...'

We witness, at each moment, the marvel that is the connection of experiences, and no one know how it is accomplished better than we do, since we are this very knot of relations. The world and reason are not problems; and though we might call them mysterious, this mystery is essential to them, there can be no question of dissolving it through some 'solution,' it is beneath the level of solutions. True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew and in this sense, an historical account might signify the world with as much 'depth' as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate into our own hands and through reflection we become responsible for our own history...

Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945

In Angel's Care, Paul Klee, 1931

Water

Ask yourself unlikely questions about water, come at it from every angle. What lives in it — beneath its surface? Why is water like our own minds? There are thoughts that flit about on its surface, but the real world of the mind all goes on beneath, in the depths of the unconscious mind, which are like the depths of the ocean. That's the part of us that dreams.

Fragments Roger Deakin


Photo by author

Unfenced existence

Every way one turned, the tundra was laid out like a green sea, sedgy and subtle and glinting with secret melt pools and waterways. It was land relishing its brief summer, open and free to breathe. To west, south and north the land seemed unbounded, but eastward, inland, there rose range after range of low, grey-blue mountains, the source of the river, with shadows in their glens and cores. Above all, the sky. Every hue of sky was present at once, here a shower, there rays of sunshine filtering through, there openings of blue, and every white and grey of cloud. The shadows of clouds drifted over the land. It was a dream vision, a mythic view of land before farms, before towns and roads, unparcelled, unprivatised, whole.

From Upriver by Kathleen Jamie