Both the tide and the weather were on their way in, but all was quiet on the beach at Appledore, with barely a breath of wind to stir your hair and a stillness so profound that you could hear people talking and dogs barking on the other side of the River Torridge at Instow, half a mile away.
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NB. The sea is about two and a half miles behind the boat.
Tags: Appledore River Torridge North Devon
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I am, it seems, rather fascinated by consciousness and reality at the moment. The main question being, which emerges from which?
Only the other day I stumbled upon a recording including a Psychiatrist/Philosphopher who, by dint of an analogy with water, was attempting to describe the relationship between matter - the building blocks of our perceived reality, and the conscious mind.
“Water”, he said, “has three phases: solid - which is hard and opaque, liquid - which is free-flowing and transparent, and gas - which is invisible and all around us. Why then might not consciousness also have phases?”
“Could not matter be an alternative phase of consciousness?” He asked.
After all, Max Planck, Nobel Prize winner and one of the originators of quantum theory, stated in 1931 that he regarded consciousness as fundamental, that he regarded matter as being derived from consciousness.
This is all rather interesting, especially when you consider that quantum mechanics is the most successful quantitative theory ever produced, and that not a single one of the thousands and thousands of experiments designed to test it has ever found the basic principles to be in error.
So what are we to make of all that? That nothing is real unless a conscious mind has first conceived it? That everything stems from consciousness? That all is consciousness? That there might actually be only one universal consciousness that gave birth to the whole of space and time, the whole of our perceived reality? That we are merely facets of that single consciousness?
I don’t know.
But I do know that if you take, say, twelve photographs of an object and later combine them into a single image, then something out-of-the-ordinary emerges. Something that didn’t exist when you looked at the original subject or the individual photographs. Something conjured by conscious thought, in a sense.
A different view of reality, one could say. Perhaps.
I don't know.
Usual caveats etc.
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Twelve hand-held exposures, taken in the graveyard of St. Mary’s Church in Appledore, looking out over the River Torridge.
Once again, the occupant, or indeed occupants of this grave are unknown. I did not see any inscriptions, but perhaps I simply missed them; or perhaps they were actually there, just hiding in plain sight.
If you have a spare half hour, and you’re in the mood for something different, you can listen to the recording here. The four people involved are far more eloquent than me.
Tags: Appledore In the round North Devon
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Looking in the opposite direction to my previous post, this is what you see when you stand in the middle of the beach and face south south west (ish).
The land in the distance is the Hartland North Devon heritage coast and, on a clear day, with 20/20 vision, you might be able to see Clovelly.
With less than 20/20 vision you may not be able to discern Clovelly, and you might even begin to suspect that the area is populated with ichthyosaurs, or giant brachiopods…
…err, what?
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Usual caveats etc.
Tags: Westward Ho! North Devon
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Somehow, I managed to arrive at Westward Ho! at exactly the right time. The tide was going out (I had planned that part) and thankfully most of the dog-walkers were still making their way towards the beach.
Imagine that, the gloriously soggy sands of Westward Ho! devoid of frantic paw prints, ball divots and start-stop welly-boot tracks. Not that I actually have anything against dog-walkers on beaches - it's a joy to see the excitement and the wagging tails - it's just extra-nice to find pristine sands when the weather is perfect for photography.
Epic clouds. Unending wet sands. Intermittent sunshine. Strong, but managable winds. Just what the Doctor ordered.
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Is it World Hyphen Day? I seem to have been on a mission to hyphenate, necessarily and un-necessarily - whatever took my fancy really.
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Usual caveats etc.
Tags: Westward Ho! North Devon
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Sometimes, while you’re out with your camera, you take a shot that you don’t really notice at the time. But then, a few weeks later, when you’re going through clearing out all of the duffers, you spot the shot hiding in plain sight. A shot where it all came together.
Here’s one I made earlier.
Beware! The tide is coming in.
Littlehampton, West Sussex.
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Usual caveats etc.
Tags: Littlehampton Sussex West Sussex River Arun seascape
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