Year of the Wood DragonWhat is a dragon? What is perception? Perhaps perception is just the process of creating a metaphor for reality.
Our two dimensional retina captures images and the brain constructs a three dimensional metaphor for what we think we saw.
Pictures and video recorded on Motuihe Island, one of Auckland's Treasure Islands.
Music performed by Yoshimi on Koto and Jon on recorder.
Intriguingly, we noticed the strange man on the beach back in November last year. The lighting was different to February this year when the dragon became noticeable from a distance, and pure serendipity that on February 10th we entered the Year of the Wood Dragon!
Both context and perspective matter, and Nature continues to amaze us.
A reminder of the relationship we have with each other and the relationship we have with our environment. A reminder to every single person, that you are the protagonist, the hero of your own epic story, and you’re never alone.
The original reason is so that the spiral exits going up to the right, because that seems a natural direction to flow.
If you imagine the spiral is coming out towards you, it looks like it is spiralling anticlockwise.
However if you walked around to the other side of the same spiral so it was going away from you, it would look like it is spiralling clockwise (like most seashells do).
Cycles always repeat in the same order. Night always follows day, summer always follows spring. However, although the sequence of seasons is the always the same, each individual season is always different from previous years. The spiral illustrates that difference, for example, every summer is not the same, but there are repeating patterns of interdependence between seasons. Emérgéntly is a framework to focus on those interdependencies and interrelationships.
Yes, but it is not always the same order.
The Emérgéntly Framework consistently spirals through the metaphors of Fire, Earth, Water, Air, BUT the order depends on what makes most logical sense for us to understand the particular situation. Our brains easily comprehend a linear sequence, but life is seldom linear and usually many things happen simultaneously and interdependently, so the "logical order" may not be the way the system actually works. An Emérgéntly spiral is just a two dimensional map of a system and "the map is not the territory".
2024 Emerges Gently
How easy it is in self-defence to turn from victim to persecutor, even with just an off-the-cuff remark. No matter how anxious we are, we can hope that peace will eventually emerge, even if more gently than preferred.
Although the weather is different every year, the seasons regularly spiral in sequence. There is a logical pattern hidden in the chaos—as observations over thousands of years have been recognised in the indigenous wisdom of many cultures. Let's patiently observe the spiral patterns, trying to be eco−logical as our journey into 2024 emerges.
What is a dragon? What is perception?
Page 2 of 6