Jai Hanuman
I’ve just arrived in Vrindavan. I have been advised to hold on to my glasses. The monkeys like to grab them and hurl them to the ground.
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In Memoriam Rep. John Lewis
May his spirit continue to inspire action.
Shrishti-Sthiti-Samhara?
It was an unexpected delight to get a yoga philosophy lesson as part of the mandatory “Records Management for Everyone” course.
The five acts of Siva are creation, maintenance, withdrawal, concealment, and revelation.The lesson had the first three covered. Missing from the lesson, though, were concealment and revelation. Perhaps those were thought of as less apt to records management.
- Art and Culture | Food for the Body | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Gardening | Meditation
Garden Mandala for Lakshmi
I had intended merely to get some lemongrass for tea. Jai Lakshmi.
Found Exhortation (and Dharma)
One sign reads: “Fight for the Things You Care About” the other reads: “In this house we believe–love is love, black lives matter, science is real, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal, water is life, and kindness is everything.”
Found Sculpture
I saw this beautiful roll of chicken wire in the Enid Haupt garden when I was walking back to the office after a quick visit to see the Gods of Angkor exhibit at the Sackler Gallery (sorry about the absence of links; blogging from the BB).
I was first introduced to the idea of “found poetry” in junior high school and have developed a life-long habit of photographing words to change, enhance, and/or question their meaning and hidden beauty by the act of extracting them from their original place and presenting them as a photograph. Marcel Duchamp and others did what poets and photographers were doing with words with ordinary objects by presenting them as sculpture.
Here, where I have photographed the chicken wire roll, is the art a sculpture (because I could treat it as such) of which I have taken a photograph–the photograph being mere documentation? Is the art the photograph of what I have seen to the extent I am offering it as a vision and a dialogue generated by what I saw? Or is the photograph merely a snapshot taken with a hand-held computer device documenting an object that happened to be sitting there–not art at all? If it were not for artists such as Duchamp, could I or would I even be able to ask this question?
I think that analogous types of questions have been and can be asked about the variety of religious and mystical experience. Is there a particular way they must be experienced? Do such experiences have to fit within a prescribed framework to be valid? When are such experiences madness or delusion and when are they the voice of the spirit? Who gets to decide? Does it depend on the era and the culture in which the experiencer lives? Does the answer to any of these questions matter if the experiences lead one to a more loving, compassionate, and beauty-filled life?
