quotes

lens-artists: books

Within one of the realms of The Wheel of Suffering, is the animal realm in which a bodhisattva is depicted holding a book representing the need for wisdom that arises through thought, speech, and reflection.

” … I come to a place where I envision myself eagerly standing before bookshelves, my eyes lightly and briefly touching upon one book’s title and then another, feeling their words tickle my thoughts until I surrender to their unspoken promises. Once engaged by the promising nature of a title, it is hope that opens a book jacket and begins another journey through pages.  With the turning of each page, desire seeks the experience of validation within the configuration of a writer’s text. All of this, I believe, is driven by memory traces of how the words of unknown authors enfolded my emotional self …” (cited: B Catherine Koeford, A Meditative Journey with Saldage)

“… you and I in the living room.  You gave me three hard bound books…illustrated books. One about the lives of bees, the other about the Civil War, and lastly…the female reproductive system, “You are a woman now.  You must wash your face twice a day …” 

I was a woman.  Three books. Books freed us to worlds beyond a rural newspaper route.  Books were trips to the library, classical comic books left on my bed, novel reenactments, and later carefully National Geographic cutouts attached to your letters.  

I loved novels. You, nature and science …”  (cited: My Mother Came to Visit, memories of my mother during Covid …”it was a remembered touch that announced her arrival”)

Unseeded and Two Springs – two photo books of personal journeys of healing.

Two Springs: you left,
I remained… two springs

A photo journey…in remembrance of my mother, Elberta.

Unseeded: “The first time I heard the word “unseeded” I felt it resonate with another term saudade, a unique Portuguese word with no immediate English equivalent.

Saudade describes a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist …”

 Ritva has invited lens-artists “to embrace your inner book lover and share your most creative photographic interpretation of anything related to books.”

lens-artists: it’s a wild life!

“And he sailed off through night and day. And in and out of weeks. And almost over a year to where the wild things are.”*

“Max said ‘BE STILL!‘ and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all wild things.”*

“And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”*

“And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.”*

Submitted in response to Egídio’s lens-artists challenge, “I would love to see your wild side.”

*Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

lens-artists: 5 elements

In Chinese Medicine, the Five Elements represent the five unique energies that are present in all things throughout nature. These include Metal, Water, Wood, Fire, and Earth. Each element expresses itself differently depending on where it’s found and also manifests in our body organs, emotions, and personalities.

When Qi is moving through our body freely, the Five Elements are said to be in balance, as Qi needs to be moving constantly for optimum health. But imbalances between the Five Elements and their corresponding energetic channels (meridians) can cause the Qi to either stagnate, or become excessive, affecting our wellbeing.*

Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.~Thich Nhat Hanh

metal

If there was no earth there would be no metal. If there was no metal this photograph would not be.

fire

If there was no wood there would be no fire. If there were no fires there would be no prairie, savanna, chaparral and coniferous forests.

wood

If there was no earth there would be no wood. If there was no wood there would be no carpenters.

water

If there were no hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms there would be no water. If there was no water there would be no fish.

earth

Without the Milky Way there would be on earth. Without our earth there would be no us.

This week Sofia (photographs) invites photographers to focus on one of the elements…and to try to get as many in one photo as possible…

*cited: poweryogaaco.com

lens-artists: this made me smile

An authentic smile … arouses an authentic feeling of freshness, and I think the smile belongs only to human beings.~ Dalai Lama

If we want those smiles, we must create the reasons that make them appear. ~ Dalai Lama

I love smiles, and my wish is to see more smiles, real smiles …~ Dalai Lama

Leya has invited bloggers to “share something that made us smile, made You smile – and make the world smile with us! Old or new smiles, big or small, we welcome them all!”

A smile awakens a smile. A frown returns a frown.

life’s passages … 102

shapes-42web

Imagine the dimension of time as a vertical line. Place yourself in the present on that line with the past above you and the future below you. Establish yourself in time. See all your ancestors that have come before you. The youngest generation of your ancestors is your parents. All of them are above you on this line of time. Then below you, see all your dependents, your children, your grandchildren, and all their future descendants. If you have no children, your descendants are the people you have touched in your life, and all the people they in turn influence. 

In you are both your blood ancestors and your spiritual ancestors. You touch the presence of your father and mother in each cell of your body. They are truly in you, along with your grandparents and great-grandparents. Doing this, you realize their continuation. You may have thought that your ancestors no longer existed, but even scientist will say that they are present in you, in your genetic heritage, which is in every cell of your body. 

plums

Look into a plum tree. In each plum on the tree there is a pit. That pit contains the plum tree and all previous generations of plum tree. The plum pit contains an eternity of plum trees. Inside the pit is an intelligence and wisdom that knows how to become a plum tree, how to produce branches, leaves, flowers, and plums. It cannot do this on its own. It can only do this because it has received the experience and heritage of so many generations of ancestors. You are the same. ~Thich Nhat Hanh (No Death, No Fear, 137-138)

baseballcaps3

This posting  was created in memory of Dustin, Bob, Elberta, Donna, Chris, Larry, Margaret, Thella, John, Clive, and Jeff who all live on within the lives of my beloved.

wednesday evening with Paul Celan

“Reachable, near and not lost, those remained amid the losses this one thing: language.

horsetooth reservoir… Nikon D750 f/7.1 1/25s 85mm 100 ISO

“It, the language remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its wounded wordlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and giveback no words for that which happened.” ~Paul Celan* (cited: V. Schwarcz, Bridge Across Broken Time p. 85)

*Poet, translator, essayist, and lecturer, influenced by French Surrealism and Symbolism. Celan was born in Cernăuţi, at the time Romania, now Ukraine, he lived in France, and wrote in German. His parents were killed in the Holocaust; the author himself escaped death by working in a Nazi labor camp. “Death is a Master from Germany”, Celan’s most quoted words, translated into English in different ways, are from the poem ‘Todesfuge’ (Death Fugue). Celan’s body was found in the Seine river in late April 1970, he had committed suicide.

life’s passages … 82

Every life is a point of view directed upon the universe. Strictly speaking, what one life sees no other can. Every individual, . . . is an organ, for which there can be no substitute, constructed for the apprehension of truth . . . Without the development, the perpetual change and the inexhaustible series of adventures which constitute life, the universe, or absolutely valid truth, would remain unknown . . . Reality happens to be like a landscape, possessed of an infinite number of perspectives, all equally veracious and authentic. The sole false perspective is that which claims to be the only one there is. ~José Ortega y Gasset

life’s passages … 81

Death of a loved one disturbs the relationships that sustain a person’s sense of ‘identity’ and the high level of binding and cathexis concentrated on the person who is lost is suddenly disrupted . . . there is a close link between the doctrines of egolessness and suffering.

De Silva, Padmasiri. An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology. Landam, MD, 2000.
Poudre Canyon… f/7.1 1/200s 28mm 4500 ISO

Through this lens of Buddhist thought, I begin to feel a crumbling of a child’s self with an understanding of how my father’s absolute and final absence from our lives disrupted the multiple relationships between my father, mother, sister, and me.  Besides the sudden severing of the identity I was forming via my father, the connecting emotional threads between those of us that were left, although still intact, were unknowingly stretched and pulled by our own individual fears of egolessness.

My father’s death left my mother, a young woman deaf from infancy, with two daughters and pregnant with her first son.  I do not recall whose idea it was to wander outside the house early that morning as my mother slept.  I can, however, imagine my young self following my older sister as if an invisible thread that tied us together tugged me along as she, with her five-year-old world view, undertook an emotional duty to find our father.  Did we believe we could find him fly fishing in the creek that ran alongside the house? Or was there something about the water that enticed us into abandoning our search?  I can recall to this day the cessation of anxiety and arising rapture that coincided with my surrender to the inevitable. Two young men, I am told, rescued us both from this search for our father.

Koeford, BC. A Meditative Journey with Saldage Homesickness for a place, a time, a person that cannot be

life’s passages … 79

To be human was to be a sentient being who remembers.*

“The third-century classic Jinshu summarized the paradox of memory: ‘Qing you yi sheng, bu yi ze wu qing.’ No words in English can capture the condensed reservations expressed in nine simple characters. The first four summarize ancient psychology: emotion is born out of remembrance. The next five advise the wise to stem this process of arousal altogether: where there is no remembrance, emotion will dissolve as well. The point, simply put, is that distress causes memory. To be sure, it is human to have feelings, but this can be curbed by a willful quieting of the emotional upheaval caused by remembrance.

“Simcha, the Hebrew word for ‘joy,’ has as its root macha, meaning ‘to remove’ or ‘wipe away.’ To be joyful, in this sense, is to be free of the tearful weight of the past.

“In the end, however, neither Chinese or Jewish rememberers settled for the peace of a memoryless world.

“The opposite of quietude can be found in the story of Lot’s wife… Here, a woman who refuses to walk away from history is turned into salt–a concrete symbol of endless weeping. Lot’s wife captures the need to remain connected to the past and dares to stand still when the known world is about to crumble. Although some might argue that Lot’s wife looked back with nostalgic regret for past pleasures, Anna Akhmatova, in the poem, ‘Lot’s Wife,’ suggest she did so out of her refusal to become deaf to the grief embedded in the past.”*

*Vera Schwarcz, Bridge Across Broken Time

life’s passages … 71

saturday morning with Kahlil Gibran

“Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.

… Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was often times filled with your tears.

… The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

…Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

… Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.

Only when you are empty are you at stand still and balanced.” …*

*cited: Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1973. pp 29-30

Leica V-Lux 5, f/4 … 1/60 s … 32.65 mm … 125 ISO