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Signs Around Town (Excerpt)
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Signs Around Town (What Are You Grateful For?)
If you’re doing well enough to read this…
But possibly not, because we never know what is going on with someone else.- Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation | Photos
Found Exhortation
Anacostia River Walk a couple of weeks ago. Today, for my midday break, I walked to the post office and then returned to my work. Because I committed to doing it.
The Capitoline Venus (and Sruti)
The Capitoline Venus arrived in DC last week from Rome–the first time this circa 200 CE sculpture has been out of Rome in nearly 200 years. What makes it especially beautiful is the apparent softness of flesh of the cool, carved marble, the seeming etherealness of the ancient solid stone.
Looking at the Venus made me think about how carving in stone can help us understand the concept of sruti. The hindu scriptures generally are classified as either sruti (revealed) or smriti (remembered) and until recent centuries were passed on through oral tradition. Those scriptures that are sruti are said to have been revealed by a divine source to the original listener. They were already there as part of the wholeness of the universe and then manifested to a particular enlightened being in a way that could be witnessed and passed on. The essence of the text was always already present, but not tangible, until it was revealed in the mind of a listener, who then passed it on.
Carving in marble takes both the emergence of idea and form in the mind/imagination of the artist and the revealing of that idea from the original stone by the craft of the artist. The sculptor has studied and practiced art and is always open to the emerging into consciousness of a particular image or idea, just as the great yogis continuously meditated and studied, open to what might be revealed.
As the sculptor may find the block of marble first or have the idea and then go looking for the right stone to express the idea, the yogi pulses between experiencing spirit and enhancing the experience through practice. It is not just an act of imagination that builds and creates something out of nothing. To some extent, the form of the final sculpture is already there in the stone. The work of the artist is to remove that part of the stone that is obscuring the witnessing and expression of the exquisite shape revealed from within by the educated and painstaking act of making art.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
“Do you have an umbrella?”
As I was headed out at lunch, a co-worker in another office whom I know only from the hallway, asked, “do you have an umbrella?”
“Yes, I do, how are you?” I replied, knowing that she was trying to be helpful. So many of us work in spaces without windows, it was not unreasonable for her to think I might not know it was raining.
Another woman who I did not know said, “I heard it might rain all weekend,” revealing herself as one who gets all knowledge of the weather from tv.
I thought, but did not say, “yes, there is that pesky hurricane coming.”
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
