New beginnings sprout from the old

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This morning I went for a walk with my wife through Mundy Park. There is a 5 kilometre perimeter trail that we like to walk that takes us 50-60 minutes depending on our pace. The trail is well maintained and well used, especially by dog owners. We take the same route every time and it makes for a great uninterrupted time to chat.

I don’t usually take my phone out during the walk but today I did so to take a few pictures of trees growing out of old, larger stumps.

I love the way old stumps and roots become the home to new growth in the forest. Decaying life becomes the fuel and the foundation for new life.

It reminds me that we don’t always have to begin anew. We don’t always have to throw everything out and start fresh. We can build from a foundation we already have, and we can use existing resources to help us. Sometimes when we are looking to make changes, to make things better, we forget the accomplishments that got us where we are now.

It’s still early February, and I know we have a lot of wet and cloud-covered days to go before we can say spring has arrived. But getting outside on a bright and fair-weather day like today, and paying attention to the cycle of life in nature, reminds me that I can look positively ahead to new adventures, while also embracing the the things I hope to change. I can reflect on how these old things are an important part of the journey we all go through. When we bring life to new ideas, we need to respect the foundation of old ideas that we built on.

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2 thoughts on “New beginnings sprout from the old”

  1. Aaron Davis

    David, the notion of new ideas growing out of the past ideas rotting away reminds me of the work of Brian Eno and the notion of scenius:

    Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

    In an interview on musical interpretations, Eno suggests:

    I always think that whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to—all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard. So what you are listening to are tiny differences, tiny innovations. Something new is added, something you’ve grown used to is omitted, something you thought you were familiar with sounds different.

    While in a conversation with Daniel Lanois, he argues that ‘beautiful things grow out of shit’:

    If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.

    Austin Kleon sums this up as follows:

    Genius is an egosystem, scenius is an ecosystem.

    1. datruss

      Greetings Aaron,
      Reading this made me think of the use of the sacred sound ‘Om’ in Hindu meditation. ‘Om’ refers to Atman (soul, self within) and Brahman (ultimate reality, entirety of the universe, truth, divine, supreme spirit, cosmic principles, knowledge)… the connection between the ego and the world we live in.
      The ‘cultural scene’ you mention is a connection between self and the experience of the world. I think of ‘Om’ in that way, as finding Oneness with your surroundings… with the ecosystem.
      Perhaps we all have an understanding of this connection at some level and a walk in nature is a way that we can feel the connection more closely? I wonder if the disconnect from this is one of the roots of the anxiety we see in people today?

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