through me tell the story

"I return once again to Homer, who says,

'Sing in me, oh Muse,

and through me tell the story.'"

......

listened to Bobby D's

Nobel Lecture

sitting on a

(covered)

balcony

while the rain softly fell.

highly recommend.

a well deserved honor:

http://www.svenskaakademien.se/en/nobel-lecture

"So what does it all mean?

Myself and a lot of other songwriters

have been influenced by these very same themes.

And they can mean a lot of different things.

If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important.

I don’t have to know what a song means.

I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs.

And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means."

perspective

there

mesmerized

two hours

passes like minutes

where am I

sitting

in India

or key west

during

peace week

dissolving

softening inside

creating space

gratitude

re-energized

ah,

impermanence

The mandala represents an imaginary palace that is contemplated during meditation. Each object in the palace has significance, representing an aspect of wisdom or reminding the meditator of a guiding principle. The mandala's purpose is to help transform ordinary minds into enlightened ones and to assist with healing.

According to Buddhist scripture, mandalas constructed from sand transmit positive energies to the environment and to the people who view them. They are believed to effect purification and healing. Mandala sand painting was introduced by the Buddha himself and there are many different designs of mandala, each with different lessons to teach.

The design of the mandala is marked with chalk on a wooden platform. This meticulous process takes an entire day.

Starting from the centre and concentrically working outwards, the monks use metal funnels called chak-pur to place millions of grains of dyed sand to make the elaborate patterns. The vibrations of the chak-pur being grated with a metal rod cause the sands to flow like liquid.

monks from Drepung Gomang Monastery in India at St Paul's

Key West, FL January 10, 2017

Once the mandala is complete the monks ask for the deities' healing blessings during a ceremony. As the monks chant, one monk begins the destruction of the mandala by scraping a knuckle through the sand, creating a cross of grey sand.

Another monk takes a paintbrush and slowly and carefully sweeps the sand from the perimeter to the centre of the mandala. The destruction of the mandala serves as a reminder of the impermanence of life.

The coloured sand is swept up into an urn and dispersed into flowing water - a way of extending the healing powers to the whole world. It is seen as a gift to the mother earth to re-energise the environment and universe. 

The above text is from a BBC Religions online article on the mandala.

_/|\_

the one, the only

Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker

At eighty-two, the troubadour has another album coming.

Like him, it is obsessed with mortality, God-infused, and funny. 

By David Remnick

Leonard Cohen at home, Los Angeles, September, 2016.

Photograph by Graeme Mitchell for The New Yorker

October 17, 2016 Issue

from the article: When I asked him if he intended his performances to reflect a kind of devotion, he hesitated before he answered.

“Does artistic dedication

begin to touch on religious devotion?” he said.

“I start with artistic dedication.

I know that if the spirit is on you it will touch on to the other

human receptors.

But I dare not begin from the other side.

It’s like pronouncing the holy name—you don’t do it.

But if you are lucky, and you are graced, and the audience is

in a particular salutary condition,

then these deeper responses will be produced.”

 

 (blessed to have been at the show in Charlottetown, P.E.I. on his 2008 tour)

by far, the most powerfully moving live performance I have ever experienced...

♥︎ thank you ray ♥︎

learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions.....

Solace ~David Whyte

is the art of asking the beautiful question, of ourselves, of our world or of one another, in fiercely difficult and un-beautiful moments. Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.

Solace is the beautiful, imaginative home we make where disappointment can go to be rehabilitated. When life does not in any way add up, we must turn to the part of us that has never wanted a life of simple calculation. Solace is found in allowing the body’s innate wisdom to come to the fore, the part of us that already knows it is mortal and must take its leave like everything else, and leading us, when the mind cannot bear what it is seeing or hearing, to the birdsong in the tree above our heads, even as we are being told of death, each note an essence of morning and mourning; of the current of a life moving on, but somehow, also, and most beautifully, carrying, bearing, and even celebrating the life we have just lost. A life we could not see or appreciate until it was taken from us. To be consoled is to be invited onto the terrible ground of beauty upon which our inevitable disappearance stands, to a voice that does not soothe falsely, but touches the epicenter of our pain or articulates the essence of our loss, and then emancipates us into both life and death as an equal birthright.

Solace is not an evasion, nor a cure for our suffering, nor a made up state of mind. Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part. Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of.

To look for solace is to learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions, questions that reshape our identities and our bodies and our relation to others. Standing in loss but not overwhelmed by it, we become useful and generous and compassionate and even amusing companions for others. But solace also asks us very direct and forceful questions. Firstly, how will you bear the inevitable that is coming to you? And how will you endure it through the years? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light and then just as you are beginning to understand it, take you away?

an invitation, not an answer......

Conversational Leadership

 What is the courageous conversation we are not having....

 

 'anything or anyone that

does not bring you alive

is too small for you'

    
Juicy!

we are...

Humankind has not woven the web of life.

We are but one thread within it.

Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.

All things are bound together.

All things connect.

~ Chief Seattle, 1854

♡

come on now, ring that bell

What a force this woman is...

To be wrong all along and admit it is not amazing grace

When you're lost

you will toss every lucky coin you'll ever trust

more here, including another version of this song with guitars and strings that is a.w.e.s.o.m.e.

the hill I'm walkin' up is gettin' good and steep...

do I make myself a blessing to everyone I meet...

lionheart

Bouquets

One flower at a time, please

however small the face.

Two flowers are one flower

too many, a distraction.

Three flowers in a vase begin

to be a little noisy.

Like cocktail conversation,

everybody talking.

A crowd of flowers is a crowd

of flatterers (forgive me).

One flower at a time.

I want to hear what it is saying.

-robert francis

I was made this one-at-a-time way.

I am also part of my beautiful mama's garden.

Emotional overwhelm is something I am prone to.
At a younger age (and still to a lesser extent)
it was overwhelm from the feelings themselves.

I feel deeply and a lot.

As I age into my fourth decade,

'what to do' about intense feelings can overwhelm me.

Clearly, nothing needs to be done about the feelings themselves. They are what they are, indicators of what is going on under the surface, and a tremendous source of wisdom.

Engaging the courage to feel with the willingness to act is true assertiveness.

Lionheart ~ Kim McElroy

I was blessed to be at this

Live performance at the Hollywood Bowl in 2008.

It was also Overwhelming...

♥

magnifique!

“Many of Danielle Richard’s paintings feature a vista, a clearing,

a door, or a window through which a feminine gaze appears to flee,

but what it truly seeks is to delve into its most intimate being.”

♥

even though I don't understand French, I love listening to it.

this looks like a lovely presentation in Danielle's honour...

A bit of history about the origin of the word 'empathy' in Art that doesn't seem to be commonly known: In 1873, the art historian and philosopher Robert Vischer was the first person credited with using the German term Einfühlung to explain how we  'feel into' or the 'in-feeling of' works of arts and nature. His father, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, had previously used a similar term Einfühlen in explorations of Idealism relative to architectural form.

In the late 1800s the Father of Experimental Psychology William Wundt used empathy in terms of human relationships but still from an art-based position, saying 'when empathizing with a work of art, the beholder physically imitates the object and imaginatively projects himself into the object.'

A student of Wundt's, Theodor Lipps, transfered empathy to psychology in an attempt to explain how we discover that other people have selves, though he presented many examples from the visual arts, including 'when I observe a circus performer on a hanging wire, I feel I am inside him'.

Freud got in there then with 'putting oneself in another person's position', and in 1909, a psychologist named Edward Titchener translated Einfühlung into the adjective 'empathic' which he defined as the appreciation of another person's feelings, or the process of humanizing objects,

of reading or feeling ourselves into them.

From then on it seems like the art/aesthetic origin was no longer referred to, and around 1929 it started to get confusing when philosophers began arguing that empathy was more cognitive than emotional, and ever since then the lines between empathy and sympathy have been blurred, empathy commonly referring to cognitive function and sympathy to feeling, though they are often used interchangeably in today's society (this confusion clearly illustrated especially in the comments here). It also became a political tool; it can be very politically incorrect to be non-empathetic, and to be sympathetic has its own weakness/negative connotations as well.

I would like to see the downfalls of this confusion around

the word empathy and how it is being used as a distraction illustrated more clearly and spoken of more often,

as Edwin Friedman does in the fascinating book

A Failure of Nerve, where he says that the increased popularity of empathy is largely a symptom of the 'herding/togetherness forced characteristic of an

anxious society'.

I personally align with the earlier meaning of empathy in which I see the roots being represented aesthetically

('the science of feelings') through the arts as early (and likely even earlier) as the mid-1700's when Johann Georg Sulzer said that 'art is the expression of a psychological state of man; it imitates human nature in that it expresses nature through the representation of an object.'

Going with this version of empathy and distinguishing it from sympathy by defining it simply as having loyalty, support, or favor with, ultimately paves the way for less semantic confusion and more opportunity to...

throw all of this out the window!

and just be compassionate.

that is, recognize our shared humanity.

♥

Feel life.

Be life.

Accept life.

oh twelve

budding flower

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone.

I think that's what I get from these older black women,

that every soul is to be cherished,

that every flower Is to bloom.
~Alice Walker

 

sand... close up

Be master of your petty annoyances

and conserve your energies

for the big, worthwhile things.

It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out,

it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
~Robert Service

♥

she rocks

and she rolls...

♥

 

'garden splendor'

Milan ~ a completely self-taught artist

born in Angeles City, Phillipines

"What lifts you into a higher perspective of your overall life, current situations and conditions aside,

and is there any imagery you connect with that

grounds you at the same time?"

in the spirit of living the questions,

for me what lifts and grounds me is

whatever touches

the loving as well as the suffering

in my heart,

awakening,

exciting,

lifting,

and soothing

spirit and soul,

connecting me to my higher power
and all other be-ings.

yoga!

poetry.

art.

humour.

nature,

being among it as well as

imagery like the piece above.

~   ~   ~

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence something that wants our love.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke