The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

This isn’t about the Force, although I did read recently that a lot of Scottish policemen have put ‘Jedi’ down as their religion on their work forms.

More days than not I spot an example of the sun influencing nature in a way that is new to me in some way. In general terms it is fairly old news that a place that receives no direct sunlight will appear different in some way. It is in the detail that the novelty is to be found. The more obvious signs might be that it has different plants growing and an abundance of mosses and lichens.

The more fascinating signs are subtler, created by factors that are minute but combine to create an effect. The first picture shows how broadbrush nature can be. Despite looking in one direction towards a single hillside, as many as six different bands of colour are visible.…

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My research into this subject constantly leads me, very willingly, back to the thin line that runs, curving between philosophy, religion, science and nature. If such a line exists – discuss!

I would go so far as to say my work would be very awkward if my personal jury had come in unanimously in favour of any hard views in any of those areas. Sometimes there is a deep longing to know more about things that I know I likely never will. It is hard to articulate this sensation perfectly, but it would perhaps be summed up well by saying that it can sometimes be assuaged by Frank Lloyd Wright’s line, ‘I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.’

There are some natural phenomenon that deeply spiritual people jump up and down about and then point to, in a calm spiritual manner, but which secularists wave away nonchalantly…

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There is a fly buzzing around me at the moment that is seriously dopey, it seems to me that its best days might be behind it. It keeps landing on my hand or face and lingering for a dangerously long time, like its will to live has evaporated.

This reminded me of my trip to the Sahara last month. All signs of life in a desert are interesting at some level, usually including some navigation clues. Flies were no exception. They were not a big problem, and we could go for several hours without noticing them, but then they would appear in a swarm business (I just Googled the collective noun for flies and apparently it is either ‘swarm’ or ‘business’. I love the latter.)

Sometimes their appearance was easy to understand, if we were closing in on an oasis or wadi with some vegetation. These were…

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Something that I must have been aware of at some level for years, but that only arranged itself in my mind as an idea yesterday was the difference between the observations of characters in travel stories. There is a marked difference between what a character notices depending on the viewpoint that the author has chosen. First person travel characters seem to notice more natural detail. It must be easier to convince a reader that the subtle way a tree branch bends is relevant if the character is portrayed in the first person. Something that I had not previously given much thought to is that this seems to apply equally to fiction and non-fiction. This has probably organized itself into a coherent idea at the moment because I am having to concentrate my research for the book I am writing. It is…

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I ran a small private course yesterday and enjoyed a wonderfully ironic moment. It was almost embarrassing.

The first half of the day was spent indoors studying the theory, looking at photographs and playing with celestial models. One of the points I am always keen to make is about the relationship between the uses of our senses and wayfinding. Sight is so often under-rated because its use is so immediately obvious, but we rarely acknowledge how much detail is allowed to escape. For example, we have evolved to identify things by shape much more readily than by colour or shade. Our brains tend to identify an object as a tree, ie. not a threat, and then move on to processing other information without noticing the subtle differences in shades of the leaves at all. Sometimes it pays to rein it in, to force it to focus and to analyse some…

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Time for a bit of ramble.

At the heart of natural navigation there is potential for conflict.

If the sun did not behave with rational, dependable predictability then reading its effects might be a forlorn cause. We can say with great confidence where it will be in the sky at almost any moment in the future. And yet, nearly everything that follows the sun closely, from plants and animals to the weather itself, does not seem to have much fondness for rigid patterns or predictability.

This photo is an example. I could have worked out exactly the spot that the sun would rise and what it would do during the day years ago if I chose to, it would be a poor bookie who took bets on that sort of thing, but the weather… that is very different. The odds of me being surrounded by deep snow right now, particularly…

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Regular readers may recall how my chilli plants demonstrated an aversion to wind and cold. Yesterday I spent a full and enjoyable day with some of the team from Sire Technology, who were braving the Pathfinder course.

The day consists of an intense morning of indoor training followed by a good leg stretch in the South Downs. Part of the morning is spent going through a few exercises aimed at awakening the senses and raising awareness. I was delighted therefore when, during the afternoon’s practical exercise, Barry from Sire pointed out something that I had walked past without noticing several times. The photo is taken looking northeast and the corn that is being shielded from the sun’s rays by the trees to the left of the picture is fairing a lot worse than that to the right.

On a tangent… Before writing this post I thought that I…

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My wife and I spent nearly all the weekend on the water, which will be a rare treat until our boys are a bit older. There was lots of sun, plenty of mist and fog and not very much wind. It would have been nice to have done more sailing and less motoring, but we were ecstatic just to be out there.

In my last entry I talked about dawn and dusk colours, these two dawn pictures show the shift in colour quite nicely. There was only one minute between the two shots. Interestingly it appears to have reddened, which is not what we’d usually expect to see – ah, nature, that slippery friend!

Natural navigators will have spotted already the windswept nature of the trees on the shoreline, confirming that we are indeed looking southeast.

I regularly find myself balancing the scientific explanations for something, natural observations of the same thing, historical accounts and even folklore. It can be a rich mix. This morning I came across a fun site that gives a good flavour of how diverse this subject can be in its page about the winter solstice.

Time and navigation have a cosy relationship, as John Harrison, inventor of the chronometer that cracked the longitude problem in the 18th Century would attest. The sun, earth, moon and planets and stars have at times been seen as cogs in a huge clock.

So many natural phenomena take their orders from these bodies and tide is one of the best known of these. I took this photo of the tide running past a cardinal off Jersey this weekend. The cardinal is an easterly one, signalling that the safer water lay to the east of it. But could it tell us anything else? With two pieces of information, time and tide table, we can discern others such as the speed of the water and its direction. If we had no other references: no sight of land, no chart, no compass, no GPS… that small patch of water could reveal…

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