During this time of uncertainty Mill Tye Gallery will be reaching out to professional photographers and artists to inspire your creativity and help you to stay well.
This is the second in a series of blog posts from guest photographer Tom Ang who has written 10 ways to help us to revitalise our vision and creativity. If you follow Tom’s blog and put the ideas into practice, please feel free to share your thoughts or photos that you are inspired to create, with us and we will share them with Tom and on The Mill Tye Gallery Facebook page to help inspire others.
Still life from the ‘Homescapes’ collection by Tom Ang
Re-link neurons by immersing in recordings of bird songs
e.g. blackbird, warblers, swallows, nightingale. Just absorb, empty, receive, open up. Don’t try to listen foranything, just enjoy, marvel and sink in: let the songs vibrate through your head. This might seem to be a bit far-fetched, perhaps pointless to you. But it’s known that bird song can be a huge help to people recovering from strokes. It calms people, slows them down.
Modern life is so full of minute details that you need to remember: your personal identification numbers, ten different passwords and access codes for various web-sites, your own phone number, how to use at least a dozen features of at least half-a-dozen software applications - each of which does everything in its own way … the list goes on, and we haven’t even really started.
In response the brain gets stressed and functions inefficiently. There’s a lot of neurobiology that shows this. What happens, roughly, seems to be that our brain gives priority to what appears to be most important: what we need to get through the day like driving safely, remembering to keep smiling through a dreadful meeting, remembering an important anniversary. Creative concerns fall a long way down the agenda. We don’t need to sort them to get through the day.
After enough neglect, we forget - our brain forgets - how to think creatively. We forget how to think freely, without urgency or the need to solve immediate conflicting calls on our time.
We get out of practice.
Listen to bird songs for a few minutes. Ideally through head-phones, but certainly turn off any music you might have on.
Did you enjoy that? Did you feel transported to a different space, even a different time.
There are literally hundreds of hours of excellent bird-song recordings on YouTube, and elsewhere on the Internet.
For further information about Tom Ang, his photography and his books please visit https://tomang.com