Each week I send out a short, fresh reflection from the road – photographs, sketches, and observations from old places that still have something to teach us. What follows is a moment from those travels.
Dad's Wall
"If the road is beautiful, travel the road slowly; be a turtle, be a snail and even better than this: Stop traveling; live the road fully."
Mehmet Murat Ildan
Preamble
Mum is the biggest fan of my digest. Every Friday at around 7am I get a text outlining what she liked about the digest.
Mum had a little fall yesterday (she's fine and recovering). I spent last night at her house and, in my childhood bedroom, during the early hours, wrote the following observation with her in mind.
Get well soon, Mum x.
Quantumly Entangled.
“All art can have the power of poetic revelation about the material world - it can reveal the ensoulment of the universe.” - Hugh Conway Morris
There is a passage from Rob Cowen’s book, Common Ground that I keep going back to over and over again. In his book, Rob engages with the landscape around his home and comes across a particularly beautiful spot:
“It’s moments like these that make you think places have a memory all of their own. It’s hardly a theory, more a feeling born of so long spent outside, but what if landscapes somehow become repositories of personal and collective memory? What if traces are imprinted or stored in an imperceptible or intangible way, and the land itself retains the culture of a place? Then what if, when a certain set of stimuli is triggered, a kind of molecular union occurs between that place and a person whereby memories and experiences are passed on like the sting of a nettle?”
It’s a feeling that I touched upon in last week's digest where the village of Bosham had a perceptible atmosphere saturated with meaning. Well, it seems that Rob’s ‘hardly a theory’ perception of connection to a place might actually be a theory - at least on the quantum level.
In 2022 Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their remarkable experiments in quantum entanglement. The theory states: where two or more particles are entangled, no matter where they end up in the universe, they remain connected and communicative. Their states remain linked. Apparently, when viewed in the quantum sphere, dimensions like time and space are irrelevant and non-existent.
Time and space - irrelevant. Wow!
It corresponds with the Incan worldview where they believe that the past and future is alive in every present moment.
"It corresponds with the Incan worldview where they believe that the past and future is alive in every present moment."
Many years ago, I wrote a thesis on Genius Loci in Architecture that led me to the doorstep of that idea, but I couldn’t quite get through the door. However, it seems that other more capable artists, word-smiths and creatives were able to sense and feel the theory before it percolated into the scientific domain. Here's a collection of their poetic words. They all have the quantum theory of entanglement hidden within their meaning:
“… place and mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both be altered. "
Nan Shepherd. The Living Mountain.
"Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within."
Oodgeroo Noonuccal, The Past
"...every last thing in creation is alive, everything is sensate, everything can be enrolled into the world of human imagination."
Robert Ferguson, The Cabin in the Mountains.
"There are certain places, conjunctions of line and contour, where thoughts settle and cohere.."
Richard Skelton - Beyond the Fell Wall
“There are places, just as there are people and objects and works of art, whose relationship of parts creates a mystery, an enchantment, which cannot be analysed.”
"Could the essence of a place hold a palpable and manifest memory of the past through the process of quantum entanglement? "
Could the essence of a place hold a palpable memory of the past through the process of quantum entanglement? I become overwhelmed by the notion and, before long, I am quantumly entangled (and exceptionally comforted) by the idea that, through the optics of a quantum field, we might be tangibly linked to those that we love and have lost.
Perhaps, just perhaps, as if from the sting of a nettle, when I think of my dad (who we lost in 2008) - by some strange quark of nature - we are manifestly connected on the quantum level - no time, no space - just back together again.
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Each week, this Digest offers a small pause – photographs, sketches, and reflections from historic places that still carry meaning. It’s a weekly practice of noticing, continuity, and learning to see more deeply.
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