I just came across a site called GigaPan, with gigapixel photos, i.e. extremely large pictures. I found there this picture of the central part of our galaxy (take the full screen view). At first you just see this band of light, but when you zoom into the photo (it takes a moment for the image to re-load), you discover millions of stars – we are living in a totally crowded universe. Awe-inspiring. It made me think of the famous sentence by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1788): “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” And if you imagine that the whole universe is also reflected within us, being made “in the image and likeness”… we can zoom into the subjective worlds and discover millions of vistas, where at first sight we don’t discover much.

Photo of the central part of our galaxy, by esoepod (c)

An Indian friend sent me the link to a video about murmuration. I have seen smaller swarms of bird flocks but these pics are really extraordinary, caught in the right moment. He writes:

“No one knows why they do it. Yet each fall, thousands of starlings dance in the twilight above England and Scotland. The birds gather in shape-shifting flocks called murmurations, having migrated in the millions from Russia and Scandinavia to escape winter’s frigid bite. Scientists aren’t sure how they do it, either.

The starlings’ murmurations are manifestations of swarm intelligence, which in different contexts is practiced by schools of fish, swarms of bees, and colonies of ants. As far as I am aware, even complex algorithmic models haven’t yet explained the starlings’ aerobatics, which rely on the tiny birds’ quicksilver reaction time of under 100 milliseconds to avoid aerial collisions—and predators—in the giant flock.

Two young women were out for a late afternoon canoe ride and fortunately one of them remembered to bring her video camera. What they saw was a wonderful murmuration display, caught in this 2-minute video.”

Picture from the video of the movements of huge swarms of birds. (c)

An incredible real time video of a full moon rise shot by Marc Gee of the moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, New Zealand. He writes:

“People had gathered up there this night to get the best view possible of the moon rising. I captured the video from 2.1km away on the other side of the city. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to photograph for a long time now, and a lot of planning and failed attempts had taken place. Finally, during moon rise on the 28th January 2013, everything fell into place and I got my footage. The video is as it came off the memory card and there has been no manipulation whatsoever. Technically it was quite a challenge to get the final result…”

Picture of the video (c)

In the news we read that all over the world bees are dying due to pesticides and/or parasitic mites. Bees pollinate three quarters of all crops, and their disappearance will cause a tremendous impact on our food production. While politicians and scientists are still quarrelling over the potential causes, the bee mortality goes on. Last Monday, the ministers of the EU decided about a ban of 3 pesticides – a result also of intense campaigning of NGOs, partly by flooding decision makers in Brussels with massive public mailings. The bee battle goes on.

This morning a Canadian friend sent the link to a fantastic video, “The Beauty of Pollination“, taken from a talk at TED by Louie Schwartzberg, director and cinematographer, saying “we are all dependent to each other”. I blogged about it before 1.5 years ago, but it is worthwile re-blogging. The full-length version of Beauty of Pollination, called “Wings of Life“, has been released on Blu-ray and DVD by Disneynature on April 16, 2013.

Picture from the video “The Beauty of Pollination” (c)

A Canadian friend sent me the link to this great Greenpeace video spot (1’30) for Earth Day, April 22nd, 2013. Very well done!

A picture from the Greenpeace video.

Yesterday I got a beautiful time-lapse video about the opening of a rose. And here is a short extract from the book “The Teachings of Sanat Kumara” by Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar about a test with a rose a Master of Wisdom used to do with aspirants:

“To see how much harmlessness one carries, a Master of Wisdom used to play a trick. He gave a rose to the one who came to him and conversed with the person who held the rose in the hand. If the rose crippled with the touch of the person, he did not prefer to give wisdom to such a person. If the rose remained intact for long hours and continued to be fresh, he allowed them to get into the occult training. Observe the plants around you, the animals around you and the humans around you. If they blossom at your side, you are in a good way of harmlessness. If they shrink with your presence, observe that there is a lot to be desired in terms of harmlessness.”

Here are three other beautiful time-lapse videos.

A Rose for you:

A Canadian friend sent me the link to an astonishing balance act performance by a Chinese artist. I found the same balance act done by a Swiss artist, Lara Jacobs Rigolo, and this in a less showy feminine performance, with meditative music. A mastery of the forces of gravity.

And if you would like to see another meditative video, have a look at “Kawu Sun” (below) – beautiful scenes of weightless floating in water and encountering a sea cow / manatee. All videos have in common that they are an outer expression of inner balance, harmony and beauty.

This morning a Canadian friend sent me the link to a site from “Positive News“, “The Man who Planted a Forest“. At first I thought it was about “The Man who Planted Trees” from Jean Giono, but it was a fascinating article about Jadav Payeng, an environmental activist and forestry worker in India’s Assam region, who by planting seeds along a barren sandbar of the river Brahmaputra near his birthplace created a huge forest. There is also a good article about him in Wikipedia. Now, there are thousands of trees and five tigers, three rhinos, reptiles, birds and other animals.

By the way, there is an UNEP programme to plant billions trees about which I blogged 6 years ago when it was a plan to plant a billion trees – now they are heading for many billions – and it is needed on the planet! And there is a good story about planting seeds and honesty.

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Jadav Payeng, from Wikipedia

This year it seems that the winter doesn’t want to end. Luckily I had a break for a month in India in January… Every Sunday we go out for a walk. Last weekend it was snowing and grey, two weeks before the Sun was radiant and reflecting in the snow. Both series of photos are from an area about 15 km away, which I like very much – when the weather is fine you have a great panoramic view of the Alps, and the soul can expand and take a deep breath. And even when the air was grey the snow created many subtle colour shades. Now the snow is slowly receding in the valleys, but in the mountains it will continue for some more time. Enjoy

Winter is hard for the animals outside

A herd of horses at their stable; the roof is full of icicles

Icicles at a barn roof

A Bernese farmhouse with the typical deep-drawn roofs

Biglen, village in the sun

A “Christmas Tree”

A majestic icicle

Fanstastic view of the Bernese Alps with Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau

Icicles and snow

This week when I did a Google search for image elements I wanted to use for a new painting I also searched for pictures of embryos and the growth in the womb. And then I came across all kinds of pictures of inner organs and the like.

Though these weren’t new for me at all, I suddenly became very vividly conscious how under the surface of our skin there is a totally different world than what we normally have in our awareness: When I meet other people I don’t see them in terms of muscles, heart, lungs, intestines and the like. I perceive a personality and, if clear enough, the soul working through the body. I see a being expressing through the body. We speak, exchange, express love, sympathy or any other emotions. We communicate, build up concepts, and live in the worlds of our family, profession or society. And some millimetres below our skin there is this world of pulsating organs, like another planet. A wonder how we blank out these dimension and live in our own worlds, created by our perception. Of course it is illusionary and transient, but that is the dimension where we are mostly living in. And in the underground there are forces and laws at work which shape our destinies… And just like we are not aware of what is just below the skin, we are normally not aware what is just below our conscious awareness.

A picture I selected for the painting was a drawing of an the embryo in the uterus by the Scottish anatomist William Hunter (1718–1783).  I transformed it into blue and integrated it into the picture I did for Cancer. The embryo is head downwards, like our normal perception. Even if we are living with our heads up, we are mostly oriented “downwards” to matter. Let’s turn around and look upwards. It is just a little change in perspective.

William Hunter, drawing of an embryo, from Wikimedia