spirituality

Weekly Photo Challenge: A Day in My Life

Is my mind elsewhere

Or has it simply not sung?

Hototogisu

~Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693)*

creating images

Weekly Photo Challenge: A Day in My Life. Another multi-photo challenge! Make sure you include picture captions to explain to people what they’re seeing, and experiment with the tiled galleries.

*Hototogisu, translated as cuckoo, wood thrush and sometimes nightingale.

The bird’s song is a strong but mournful cry.

It is said to die after singing 8,008 times.

It is also known as the “bird of time,”

“messenger of death” and “bird of disappointed love,”

and flies back and forth from this world to the next.

Confucian axiom: If one’s mind is elsewhere, one will look but not see, listen but not hear

cited in:

The Classic Tradition of Haiku

Edited by:  Faubion Bowers

Weekly Photo Challenge: future tense

In today’s WordPress challenge I’m hoping you’ll put all of that futuristic camera tech to good use, by thinking about the shape of things to come… In a new post created for this challenge, share a picture that says FUTURE TENSE

future tense

The Radiant Buddha said:

Regard this fleeting world like this:

Like stars fading and vanishing at dawn,

Like bubbles on a fast moving stream,

Like morning dewdrops evaporating on blades of grass

Like a candle flickering in a strong wind, echoes, mirages, and phantoms, hallucinations, and like a dream

The Eight Similes of Illusion, from the Prajna Paramita Sutras

photo friday: springtime

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape–the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. ~Andrew Wyeth*

photofridspring

Snow yet remaining

The evening slopes are misty –

An evening in spring. ~Iio Sogi**

cited in:

*John Connolly, The Wrath of Angels

**Faubion Bowers, The Classic Tradition of Haiku

autumn remains

Seeing our finger,

hearing a frog jump into the water,

experiencing the sunrise,

washing one’s face in the early morning –

anything will serve as a medium of realization if the mind is serene ~ Robert Aitken, A Zen Wave

autumn remains

If you stay at a place where a feeling of loneliness

[or sadness, detachment, voidness] comes,

the contemplative absorption arises in us ~Paltrul Rimpoche

accompany you home

leaf waterfall

Dear Larry,

as the winter winds travel across Wyoming’s landscape

the swirling snow releases its memories of you, lost upon Casper Mountain

its frigid touch awakens me to imagine your

aloneness in that wilderness of blinding snow

cries, deafened by the river of winds,

calling out in hope for

a human form to emerge out of the whiteness

the warmth of a human hand

the sound of a voice, comforting you

to accompany you home.

as I become lost within this winter’s swirling thoughts

the river winds tear into my soul

releasing tears arising from

the darkness of grief’s aloneness, seeking

a knowing to emerge out of ignorance’s darkness

you found peace

within a loving presence

that embraced you

and accompanied you home –

until then may refuge be found within the nature of things.

toddler shoe laces

thrift store1sign

toddler shoes in an antique store

Touching the present moment, we come to know the past created the present and together the future is being created. ~ Unknown

thrift store 2sign

shoe lace I

Just as you unreel the thread from a spool,

I want the past to become present.

thrift store 3sign

shoe lace II

The wife of Yoshitsune, a famous warrior in medieval Japan, wrote this farewell poem shortly after her spouse was deployed to the northern provinces where he later died.  She offers to us our creative ability to mentally bring the past alive and into the present.

thrift store 4sign

shoe lace III

… “Time goes from present to past.”  This is not true in our logical mind, but it is in the actual experience of making past time present.  There we have poetry, and there we have human life.

~ cited in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki

thrift store 5sign

shoe lace IV

weekly photo challenge: illumination

IN A NEW POST CREATED SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS CHALLENGE, SHARE A PICTURE THAT MEANS ILLUMINATION TO YOU.

Roget’s International Thesaurus: applying color, explanation, learning, lighting, ornamentation, painting, picture, radiation, teaching

how colorless, now–

fields where I took bush clover

for my garden ~Satomura Genjo

winter’s slumber before January’s snow

winter's slumber

winter’s slumber