I am lucky enough to live in a part of Japan where I can walk out the door and within five minutes be walking up through the local hills in lush green mature woods, finding viewing spots every so often 'affording stupendous revelations' - views across Sagami Bay, the weather coming in, the sun setting beyond the Hakone hills across the water.
We humans have spent several million years evolving in the natural world, and as a result, I reckon, have somehow got into our genes a need for harmony in our lives. We seek harmony, and feel uncomfortable in unharmonious situations. We like to wear clothes that match; we cook foods that go together; we worry whether the curtains go with the carpet; and all of us all over the world appreciate music - which is all about disparate sounds producing a harmonious whole - which is something we all love to hear.
I realised this last week - I was walking along the shore and got drawn to the fishermen's huts, shacks full of oddments and oddities, some useful, others just randomly thrown together and left. I found myself photographing them and trying to find pleasing combinations of shapes and colours, as you do. When the right combination came into the viewfinder I clicked the button. But how do we know what the right combination is? It's all to do with an inbuilt appreciation of harmony.
Harmony is, of course, not uniformity. If every object was, say, white, then there would be no harmony. If every instrument played the same note, there would be no harmony. Harmony is about reconciling and celebrating differences.
Harmony is not a state, like heaven. Nature reminds us of this - harmony is an ever-changing process of competition for resources, life and death. A never-ending process of learning and understanding, with no end, no result, no final solution, other than the random snapshot we are presently witnessing.
Harmony doesn't happen easily - it takes time. Nature reminds us of this too - it has taken billions of years to produce this present state of natural beauty that we can witness all around us, all the time - as the poets, among others, remind us - 'to see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower' (Blake).
So it is with human relationships. Just as a baritone sax and a piccolo might not on the face of it seem ideally suited to make harmonious music together, they can if they work at it for a while. But they, or their players, have to have the will to try.
