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    Found Exhortation?

    ByElizabeth

    When I was walking past this sign with a regular reader of my blog and stopped to take its picture, I said in response to the raised eyebrows, “found exhortation–triumph New York City.”

    “It’s just the local Triumph dealership.”

    “If one just read the sign, though,” without knowing of the brand, it surely could be read as an exhortation to New York City.”

    What a perfect example of how hard it can be to understand each other through only language. That words can have so many ways of being construed shows how much empathy and compassion for ourselves and those with whom we are in communication we need to foster in order truly to listen and be heard.

    Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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    Archimedes

    ByElizabeth

    “We all know that distance gives perspective. Archimedes said that if he had a lever long enough and a place to stand, he could move the world.” Anodea Judith, Waking the Global Heart.” (Willow Street Yoga book club reading for March–meets the third Sunday of each month; I will let you know what is the reading for April).

    Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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    Ganesha (Deity of the Marines?)

    ByElizabeth

    A senior colleague and I spent several hours today working together on a very challenging aspect of a long-term project.  When we were wrapping up for the day, I showed him a murti of Ganesha that another co-worker had brought me from the Norton Simon Museum when she had gone on a business trip to Pasadena, where our Los Angeles office is located.

    I said that I do not believe in the Hindu deities as gods, but find them helpful for contemplation as archetypes (in the Jungian sense).  I said that being on this project has taught me much about yoga and about Ganesha.

    “Ganesha,” I explained, “is not so much the remover of obstacles, but the one who places obstacles in your way to teach you the wisdom to grow and find a more enlightened path from having confronted the obstacles.”  “Oh,” said my colleague, “like the Marines:  adapt, improvise, and overcome.” “Well, sort of,” I replied, enjoying that we found a way to share laughter after our difficult afternoon.

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    On Seeing

    ByElizabeth

    When I paused to photograph this marker on a DC sidewalk yesterday, I wondered how many hundreds of people have walked past it–once or hundreds of times–without noticing it at all. I connected this sense of acute awareness with a conversation I had with Douglas Brooks in India, in which he said to me that he guaranteed that at that moment he was seeing more than I was seeing. He had experienced the place before, studied it extensively and intensively, and was still open to seeing. I did not take offense and none was meant. I am one who notices, but it is a given that study and experience, if one retains an openness to new understanding, maximizes the opportunity to witness.

    Paul Muller-Ortega describes the expanding ability to see and understand in terms of the essential interrelationship between jnana and vijnana–book knowledge and experiential knowledge. One without the other does not permit for complete understanding. The two together, with ever-expanding and present openness is what leads to wisdom.

    Thus, though I am one who tends to notice much of what is in my field of vision, I could not, on my first visit, possibly have seen as much in the immediate landscape as one who has devoted much of his life both to studying and experiencing it.

    Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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