sunset

Chandralekha-sharira

Chandralekha was an acclaimed bharata natyam dancer in India in the 1950s and early 1960s, Chandralekha left the dance world for two decades before emerging as an acclaimed new choreographer in 1984. Based in Madras until her death in 2007, she was dedicated to reinvigorating traditional forms with contemporary energy. This is a fraction of Sharira, her last piece, with dancer and writer Tishani Doshi. 

SUFI

The Sufic way of thinking is particularly appropriate in a world of mass communication, when every effort is directed toward making people believe certain things; that they should as a consequence do certain things that their manipulator a want them to do.
The Sufis often start from a nonreligious point of view. The answer, they say, is within the mind of mankind. It has to be liberated, so that by self-knowledge the intuition becomes the guide to human fulfillment. The other way, the way of training suppresses and stills the intuition. Humanity is turned into a conditioned animal by non-Sufi systems, while being told that it is free and creative, has a choice of thought and action.
The Sufi is an individual who believes that by practicing alternate detachment and identification with life, he becomes free. He is a mystic because he believes that he can become attuned to the purpose of all life. He is a practical man because he believes that this process must take place within normal society. And he must serve humanity because he is part of it.
The exercises of the Sufis have been developed through the interaction of two things, intuition and the changing aspects of human life. Different methods will suggest themselves intuitively in different societies and at various times. This is not inconsistent, because real intuition is itself always consistent.
The Sufi life can be lived at any time, in any place. It does not require withdrawal from the world, or organized movements, or dogma. It is coterminous with existence of humanity. It cannot, therefore, accurately be termed an Eastern system. It has profoundly influenced both the East and the very bases of the Western civilization in which many of us live- the mixture of Christian, Jewish, Moslem, and Near Eastern or Mediterranean heritage commonly called "Western."
Mankind, according to the Sufis, is infinitely perfectable. The perfection comes about through attunement with the whole of existence. Physical and spiritual life meet, but only when there is a complete balance between them. Systems which teach withdrawal from the world are regarded as unbalanced.

Expert from "The Sufis" by Idries Shah

Insomnia

I'm in a warm bed, inside the outside cold of Istanbul.
Something is not cozy inside me, and it might be the uncertainty
unclear of what doubts down on me... I project towards the security of the first sun rays
A breakfast with citrus, almonds and warm milk with honey,
and a few hours later a plate full of olives.
If the morning goes as expected,
the night will turn familiar.

MARLEY-2012 Documentary

The true meaning and power of art is to transform the soul and unite people in love. It does not matter in which form it comes, it could be Buddhist chanting or Reggae; as long as the carrier of the message stays true to heart and always non-violent. This documentary was revealing and beautiful, surely the whole world has heard the songs and here are the true reasons why it has touched us all.

40 years ago

"The visual values of the landscape have been traditionally the domain of those concerned with the arts. Yet, art, ecology, and industry as they exist today are for the most part abstracted from the physical realities of specific landscapes or sites. How we view the world has been in the past conditioned by painting and writing. Today, movies, photography, and television condition our perceptions and social behaviour. The ecologist tends to see the landscape in terms of the past, while most industrialists don't see anything at all. The artist must come out of the isolation of galleries and museums and provide a concrete consciousness for the present as it really exists, and not simply present abstractions or utopias...We should begin to develop an art education based on relationships to specific sites. How we see things and places is not a secondary concern, but primary."
Robert Smithson

Miguel Vicuña: Cantante Indígena del Ecuador

Rumi-QUIETNESS

Inside this new love, die
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

Sayulita

Tantric paintings - visual metaphysics

"They are things of beauty, "a joy forever," and thus very much capable, we may believe, to become supports of cosmic visions. They would also have been, when most abstract, the starting point of aniconic meditations. Some include a dot, a bindu, which, in Tantric metaphysics and cosmology, is the symbol of the undifferentiated absolute, both holding within itself the whole cosmos and transcending it: to concentrate on this focal point is to "see the world in a grain of sand" and to transcend it, to open, that is, one's soul both to the plenitude and the absolute pure void -shunya- of the supreme deity, invisibly present in such abstract symbols, to be reached and experienced through and by transcending them."
André Padoux

*

lands
without the slightest sound
In the spirit

Franck André Jamme

Artists anonymous from Rajasthan, India

Çavusin

Barcelona

Book Presentation

For summery and purchase:
http://libros.malaletra.com/colecciones/hilo/183-ttatimus.html

Extracts from - Seed to Seed, The Secret Life of Plants - Nicholas Harberd

"And a question forms in my mind. An unexpected question. Is the whole of the cell alive, or is only a part of it?

This is a question I haven't previously considered. A simple question of such obvious importance that I can't imagine why I've never thought of it before. What is alive and what is not? Where is the boundary between life and absence of it?"

+  +  +

"And now a further image arises in my mind. Of a petal detaching from a rose. The petal falls to the ground. Descends, twirls through air to earth. Then begins to decay. Crimson fades into brown. The petal shrivels and twists. Dark veins, a sepia background. The process of disintegration. The cells breaking down into molecules from which they're constructed. Those molecules leaching into the water of the soil. Further disordering of the molecules into their constituent atoms and ions.

Finally the petal disappears. And although it seems as if it had never existed, those once-incorporated ions, atoms, and molecules are now distributed in the earth and air. Then we move on a few years. To a time when a few of these same atoms have once again become part of a living thing. Of a grass stem picked by a child so she can suck in its sweetness. Atoms, once of the petal, then returned to earth, then of the grass, are now of the child. "

Garden of Eden of 1600's-Convent paintings, Malinalco, Mexico

 

may

lately

I have not carried my camera around in the last months, I do not feel like documenting, or commenting or saying.... I dont post, I dont write. This is all a very good sign! I'll come back...but for now I am just getting some fresh air!

uprooted

quelites

days go by in monochrome

desk

transplanting roots

new little garden

the smell of communism

While in Croatia with Sunci, strolling in Hvar, at the sight of this flower Sunci exclaimed "That is the smell of communism" As it was planted all over the country during the communist time, then in Russia I spotted the same flower and asked a Russian friend about it, who gave me the same answer, yes in fact during communist times this flower could be found all over.

All the weight of the word "communism" becomes irrelevant, it shaped lives and countries, yet is does not cease to be man's construction. At the core of human beings, where only existence can be sensed, and our sensorial perception before being rationalized and going directly to the unconscious becomes our connection with the world and reality, such a complex idea in an instant is condensed to smell. Suddenly there is simplicity, just a smell, a flower, a memory.

This reduction also shows a side of existence, regardless of the situation, we are living and our senses awake. As long as we are alive we are sensing the world, never silent, never neutral.  

Barra de la Cruz, Oaxaca

black earth, crisp air

Walking the Iztaccihautl

Extracts from - The Walking Man - by J.M.G Le Clezio

One can waste the better part of a lifetime in walking without actually being a walking man. That's obvious. And on the other hand one may have walked very little, really one may never have cared for walking, never been good at walkig, and yet be unquestionably a walking man. Such is the law of all deep-seated life, according to which beings and objects exist only in terms of a pattern peculiar to themselves, an achievement for which they are granted no handicap, no limit and no appeal. 
* * *
Paoli strolled like this along a succession of streets, some of them shady, others sunny. A mysterious force had entered into him, had distended his muscles and sinews, and was propelling him forward, over the resonant concrete. It was rather as though his body were inhabited by a perfect mechanism, where nothing was left to chance, where each movement followed naturally upon the one before, simply owing to the play of the driving-rods pivoting on their axes, of valves commanded by complex, decisive systems of gears, wth smooth wheels and cogwheels, ball-bearings steel pins and an infinity of screws. In his brain, nothing was clear. No idea could manage to take shape, not the tiniest thought. It was an expanse of fog, prevailing from end to end of his skull, from which nothing emerged except the rock, the tense cry of determination. A sort of tightrope, stretched to breaking-point, extending straight ahead of him, as far as the horizon and even beyond, along which he was walking without understanding. 

yesterday's sunset

Monte Alban, Oaxaca