art

Umwelt

The depths of the hearts
Of humankind cannot be known.
But in my birthplace
The plum blossoms smell the same
As in the years gone by.

~Ki no Tsurayuki

shapes-22webshapes-23web

The video below was created by Yoshiyuki Katayama and cited at Aeon.com.  Please gift yourself with this amazing visual journey with nature.

A term introduced by the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909, Umwelt refers to an organism’s internal and limited perceptual experience of the external world. This stunning experimental exploration of the concept from the Japanese artist Yoshiyuki Katayama contrasts flowers blooming at time-lapse speeds with insects and spiders atop them, captured in real time. As these two organisms move at what appear to be similar speeds, the viewer is reminded of the disparate timescales on which they usually operate, and the very different evolutionary goals that they pursue even as they interact with one another.


Umwelt from Yoshiyuki KATAYAMA on Vimeo.

consciousness in a …

May I find the Equanimity
that will lift this veil of shamed despair
and acquaint me to the perceived and perceiver
absent of greed, anger, and ignorance.

brendakofford_dandelionprojlinesweb

When we say, ‘I can see my consciousness in the flower.’ it means we can see the cloud, the sunshine, the earth, and the minerals in it. But how can we see our consciousness in a flower? The flower is our consciousness. It is the object of our perception. It is our perception. To perceive means to to perceive something. Perception means the coming into existence of the perceiver and the perceived. The flower that we are looking at is part of our consciousness. The idea that our consciousness is outside of the flower has to be removed. It is impossible to have a subject without an object. It is impossible to remove one and retain the other.

~Thich Nhat Hanh (The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, p.53)

Working homelessness in America…a glaring manifestation of income disparity.

white waves

Over the wide sea
As I sail and look around,
It appears to me
That the white waves, far away,
Are the ever shining sky.

~Fujiwara no Tadamichi (1097-1164)

horizonallines-2web

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin : Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics.
Think about it. Will you think about it?  ~The Graduate

beyond the entanglement of perception

 

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Nikon D750  f/7.1   1/400s  28mm   

Sometimes Providence interferes and saves the beginner from all trouble with his stops. It did so with me. I had a dog which took a great interest in my first camera from the very beginning. There is, perhaps, something about morocco leather which reminds a dog of the Elysian fields. It was a lens-cap, morocco bound outside, velvet inside, which Charlie devoured first. A cork out of a pyro bottle fortunately fitted the lens-hood exactly. Then, after eating the cap, while my head was under the focusing cloth, Charlie devoured the leather case, with all the stops in it. This was an insurmountable difficulty. I know I wrote to the maker of the lens to ask what a new set would cost, but as the amount was more than I possessed, I determined to do without. That is why I was saved from under-exposure, with I should surely have been led into with a multitude of stops.

~Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (cited: Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, The History of Photography Series, p.6)

manifest

 

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Before its so-called birth, this goats beard already existed in other forms – clouds, sunshine, seeds, soil, and many other elements. Rather than birth and rebirth it is more accurate to say, “manifestation and re-manifestation”.  It’s  so-called birthday is really a day of its re-manifestation. It has already been here in various forms, and now it has made an effort to re-manifest.

When conditions are no longer sufficient and a plant ceases to manifest, we say it has died, but that is not correct either. Its constituents have merely transformed themselves into other elements.