Go with me

It is entirely fitting that it requires a ferry to get to the beinhaus (charnel house) in the remote village of Hallstatt, Austria. 

The mythological river Styx, the conduit between the world of the living and the world of the dead,  entailed a notorious ferry ride.

Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx, Joachim Patinir c. 1515–1524, Museo del Prado of Madrid, Spain.

Situated between a lake and a mountain, Hallstatt has a famous ossuary, a site frequently used when burial space is scarce. It is filled with remarkable, and hauntingly beautiful, painted skulls.

“As a child, I visited the ossuary, with its painted skulls, one of the strangest places I have ever been—a mystic and very silent place,” the photographer Paul Krasner told The New Yorker this month. “As one would decorate a grave with flowers, the skulls were painted by the local gravedigger. Earth pigments were used, and the women’s skulls were painted with colorful flowers, the men’s with ivy leaves. The deceased’s date of birth and death were written on their forehead. This tradition began in 1720 A.D., and there are now over twelve hundred skulls, six hundred and ten of which have been painted."

"All are at one now, roses and lovers,

Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.

Not a breath of the time that has been hovers

In the air now soft with a summer to be."

~ Swinburne, "A Forsaken Garden"

Paul Krasner's photo project, Vademecum, began in 2010. The title derives from the latin vade mecum, which literally translates to “Go with me” or "Walk with me"  and refers to a handbook, manual, or guidebook.

Bone houses present the living with the opportunity to confront or commune with death and the dead. (It is an interesting fact that human beings housed their dead before they housed themselves.)1.  Krasner's project offers access to the timelessness and connectivity that these unique spaces possess. They are at once alive in the present, staring at the past, and beg contemplation of the future. "For what is a place if not its memory of itself - a site or locale where time turns back upon itself?" 2.

We are all "eventually united–as people were in these places, in these homogenous piles." - Paul Koudounaris, author of The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses 

1. Robert Pogue Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, University of Chicago Press, 2003, p38.
2. Harrison, p23

No Need to be Upset

An image from Portfolio 1 by Matthew Reamer

A Buddhist saying:

If you can do something to change the circumstances, why be upset about it?
And if you cannot do anything to change the circumstances, why be upset about it?

Wisdom of Black Elk

In the early 1930s the medicine man Black Elk told his life story to the historian John G. Neihardt. Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux who was related to Crazy Horse and fought in both the Battle of Little Big Horn and at Wounded Knee, related his remarkable life to Neihardt and the following excerpts share some Lakota wisdom.

Anogete or Woman with Two Faces from the Lakota Sweatlodge deck

"You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs: but it is the same face, laughing or weeping. When people are already in despair, maybe the laughing face is better for them; and when they feel too good and are too sure of being safe, maybe the weeping face is better for them to see."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 Ion Zupco, Untitled, March 6, 2004

"You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round...The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.

But the Wasichus [white man] have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying, for the power is not in us any more...When we were living by the power of the circle in the way we should, boys were men at twelve or thirteen years of age. But now it takes them very much longer to mature."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is set for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World."

  Black Elk 

"Hey-a-a-hey! Hey-a-a-hey! Hey-a-a-hey! Hey-a-a-hey! Grandfather, Great Spirit...All things belong to you--the two-leggeds, the four-leggeds, the wings of the air and all green things that live. You have set the powers of the four quarters to cross each other. The good road and the road of difficulties you have made to cross; and where they cross, the place is holy."

Counter-realities

David Andree - untitled (two squares) - 2010 - found image cut collage on paper

"We must for dear life make our own counter-realities" ~ Henry James

Paul Thek’s Studio 1967

Peter Hujar - Shelf With Hand - 1967 / 2010.

In 1967, Peter Hujar photographed his friend Paul Thek’s East 3rd Street studio in 1967. The Brooklyn artist Thek was a sculptor, painter, and one of the first artists to create environments or installations. As he frequently used perishable materials, Thek accepted the ephemeral nature of his art works—and was aware, as writer Gary Indiana has noted, of “a sense of our own transience and that of everything around us.”

The images Peter Hujar took of the studio explore Thek's ephemera, process, and persona. Originally taken for potential use in association with Thek’s 1967 solo exhibition at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in New York, many images in this series document the making of his infamous sculpture The Tomb/Death of a Hippie, a life-sized effigy of the artist laid to rest in a pink ziggurat. A full-size cast of his body lies entombed dressed in a suit jacket and jeans, painted a pale pink, and adorned with jewelry made of human hair and gold. This sculpture is now considered to be the masterwork of his 1960s sculpture. The Tomb was destroyed after languishing in storage, with Thek reportedly having refused delivery of the piece in 1981. Thek had grown tired of the work, “I really don’t want to have to do that piece AGAIN! Oh God no! Not THAT one. Imagine having to bury yourself over and over.” Both Thek and Hujar died of AIDS related illnesses in the late 1980s.

Peter Hujar -  Thek’s studio - 1967.

Peter Hujar's images are on view at Maureen Paley in London from September 7 – October 2, 2011. Photographs from this studio session were uncovered during the research for Paul Thek: Diver, a retrospective which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in October 2010, toured to the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and is now on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles until September 4, 2011.

Peter Hujar - Thek Working with Bicycle Wheel Above 1 - 1967.
All images are© 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC;
courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

unexpected sparks

Olivia Bee - from the series "for you, t" - 2009

 

"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person.
Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted
the flame within us."
Albert Schweitzer

one's nature and path

Tom Schutyser "Caravanserai in Iran" 2003

"It was easy enough to say...that the path to contentment was to abide by one's own nature and follow its path. Such she believed was clearly true. But if one had not the slightest hint toward finding what one's nature was, then even stepping out on the path became a snaggy matter." Ada in Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

The Road

"Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life.
The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type." Nietzsche.

I loved reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It felt like watching a movie and I read it in about as much time. But I also loved the poetic and symbolic resonances of this story. (spoiler alert) Amidst the earth's devastation, a family (albeit without a mother) takes to the road, walking through the earthly landscape, carrying "the fire," until they reach the sea.

Asako Narahashi - "Kawaguchiko" - 2003 - from half awake and half asleep in the water

The earth/sea contrast didn't strike me at first. It wasn't until they reached the ocean and the father died that I saw the sea as this force confronting earthly mortality. If the earth is a place with generative properties, the sea is no place that man can live. It offers no foothold. The sea could be read as a final mortal oblivion.

Roberto Kusterle - 2004

In Swinburne's poem A Forsaken Garden, "the ghost of a garden fronts the sea." One almost thinks McCarthy read these lines when imagining The Road:

The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.
Only the wind here hovers and revels
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers none ever will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
Years ago.

So Swinburne writes that it is to the sea that the dying look. And if there is any confusion that it is the sea that swallows the living, that consumes the "generative and degenerative" laws of mortal time, the poem's last stanza reads:

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seasacape

The sea may be unearthly, but The Road does not end in despair. It only uses the sea as a metaphor of lifelessness, of human oblivion, to counter the power of fire.

Of course "fire" represents human life force. To the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535–c. 475 BCE), fire is the primordial element out of which everything else arises. However, fire represents not just human being but human legacy. In The Road, "We carry the fire" symbolizes carrying the flame of civilization, the survival of mankind. The boy is not only the father's legacy, he is the legacy of humanity, the meaning of life.

Roberto Kusterle - "secret of lights" - 2004

In Virgil's The Aeneid, Aeneas is entrusted to relocate the House of Troy. The ghost of Hector, a fallen Trojan warrior, appears to Aeneas. "From the inner altars he carries out the garlands and the great Vesta and, in his hands, the fire that never dies" -- a fire that feeds the household gods (penates) and preserves Troy's "continuity in time." The writings of the historian Fustel de Coulanges explain that in antiquity "to be at home meant to reside within the blessing sphere of the sacred fire, in which and through which the dead maintained a presence among the living." (from Dominion of the Dead) To carry the fire is to carry the heritage of the dead into the future of those who are yet unborn.



Of course The Aeneid is a story of wanderers. Of a journey filled with the suffering and loneliness of homelessness, as well as the joy of discovery, hope and anticipation of what lies ahead. So there they they are, father and son, walking the road of life to its inevitable conclusion, meeting the good and the bad along the way. It's hard not think of Simon Hoegsberg's photograph We're All Going to Die - 100 Meters of Existence. In contrast to the darkness of The Road, Hoegsberg's photograph has a stark white background, another symbol for death. While Simon similarly captures people walking along a road, they more resemble us, people caught up in their lives, relatively oblivious that the end comes eventually.

In My Beginning is My End

Feral House #13, James Griffioen

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

~ T.S. Eliot
EAST COKER
No. 2 of 'Four Quartets' part V.

REZA: War and Peace

Reza has been a war photographer for almost 40 years and has won the 2009 Lucie Award for Documentary Photography. He is the founder of Aina (The Mirror), an international non-profit organization dedicated to the education and empowerment of children and women through the use of media and communication. His aim is for them to develop skills that can contribute to the building of a free and open society by supporting sustainable development, promoting human rights, and strengthening national unity. His work and words speak for themselves. For more images from this series visit Visura Magazine.

****

In my travels in war zones, natural disaster areas, places of sorrow and beauty, I have often been reminded of the tale told by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian sage. It is a tale known to many cultures, the tale of villagers who had never seen an elephant and are frightened when one comes near their village. The three men who are sent to examine the beast in total darkness come back with three completely different explanations of what it is. This is because each has only touched one part of the creature – an ear, a leg, its trunk – and mistakenly believes the single part is the whole of the animal. The different viewpoints lead to deep divisions in the community.

As Rumi said, “What all three of them said was true, but not one grasped the Truth. If the light of even one small candle had been shed on the elephant, they would have been able to see.”

In the years since my exile from my native Iran, in the midst of wars, revolutions, and natural disasters, and also in moments of untold peace and beauty, I have always tried to shed the light of knowledge on the events of our time. It is my hope that with this light, we may see the whole and not just the parts, the truth and not the illusion.

Though the world I have seen and photographed is a story filled with war and tragedy, injustice and heartbreak, I have come to see the power of hope and the incredible resilience of the human spirit.

****

1983. Afghanistan. Fleeing the war, the old man had left his mountain village and his past behind. He had settled with his family not far from the border. They had stopped there, within sight of the Afghan mountains, when he had raised his hand and waved the caravan to a halt. He had said he would not go any farther. He told them that they would set up camp there, and that his decision was final. Although his decision was against all reason, since they were still within reach of the Russians, it was irrevocable. Nobody dared contradict him. He was the family elder, the wise man, so his relative followed his wishes. He spent his days reading the Koran or poetry. My own exile was still recent. He said to me, “Your house, your country, your history are within you, if you let them enter. Wherever you are, they follow you.” But then, with a sigh, he admitted, with his eyes fixed on he slopes of the Afghan mountains, that he would not be able to survive without seeing his land, each and every day that God granted him to live.


1980. Iran. Kurdistan. Mahabad. Torn apart by colonial ambitions and the regional regimes between four countries – Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria – the Kurdish people has long fought for its territorial independence, and the recognition of its language, its culture, its traditions, and its social and political entity. Right after its accession to power, the Mullah’s regime sparked off the Holy War against the Kurds. The Guardians of the Revolution put to fire and the sword dozens of villages in Iranian Kurdistan in order to stifle any desire for independence and enforcing the order dictated by the new Government. There were a few of us, photographers, in front of the city central hospital. The morgue was full, so were the hospital beds. The air raid launched by the Guardians of the Revolution had brutally hit the population. The man was carrying his child whose eye had been wounded by the shrapnel of a shell thrown at his house. He told us: “Take pictures. Show that injustice to the world.” However the injustic was even greater when one of the photographers who were there made a poster of this child and his father: the poster, hung across Iran, said, altering the man’s identity and reality: “Child wounded by the Iraqi Army in Southern Iran” instead of “Kurdish child wounded by the Guardians of the Revolution.”

1990. Afghanistan. Thoughts of an exile: The first blow is against your freedom. Being different, thinking differently, having a different skin color religious belief, or political opinion: All are pretexts for enslavement. Even if the government is not actively repressive, it may cause you to lose your freedom by not protecting you. Sometimes its passivity makes it a silent accomplice in your loss of liberty. Exodus then becomes your only option. The first step you take as an exile is to leave your country, often at the risk of your own life. After this difficult transition, you begin the subtler process of trying to rebuild. You have found a refuge though exile….where you are physically safe and have intellectual freedom. Now you have to adjust to the emotional displacement of being a stranger. Within you remains the memory of your lost country, and you may feel disappointment in the land where you are now living, the country you thought would be your promised land. And beyond the joy of being free, there remains, too, a feeling of mourning for your native land. This grief is always with you, below the surface. For the exile, the joys of the present are full of the memories of the past. As you build your life in this new elsewhere – the place where you are but that is never truly home – you carry on, while always struggling with the conflict between finding inner peace in your new country and still feeling at war within yourself because you are not in your own land.

In my end is my beginning

Francesca Woodman, from Space 2 series, 1977

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~ T.S. Eliot
EAST COKER
No. 2 of 'Four Quartets' part V.

Aphorism 2

Bruce Davidson, "Untitled" 1980

'It's better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life' - Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

The Allure of Light

Photograph by Richard Winn

Last weekend in the Sunday edition of The New York Times, I stumbled across this photo in their travel section. It stopped me cold. What a photograph! Enticing and captivating, yet humble and demure. The woman, with her back to us cooking at a wooden, block table in a rustic kitchen, is bathed in light from the nearby window. But not any light. Vermeer light -- A subtle play of luminosity and colour that embraces its subject and augments an image's poetry.

Vermeer's scenes of domestic life use light that is ethereal, magical and inviting. He elevates daily life to a higher plane; the realm of Gods, perhaps? Or is it that he illuminates a terrestrial paradise. Yet, for all this, Vermeer never strays from the glory of the present moment.

Wordsworth wrote: "With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and by the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things."

Keep on not knowing something important

Dave Anderson from Rough Beauty series

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble on a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing
something important.

~Wislawa Szymorska

Endless forms most beautiful

Gregory Crewdson from Natural Wonder series

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us...Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of species by means of natural selection..." (1859)

A Painful Pill to Swallow

"Make Believe Damien Hirst For The Love of God" by Jim Riswold

I don't understand our economy. How can it be possible that telling Americans to borrow more money is good for the economy, when we're all already in debt above our eyeballs. And how does it make sense that lower gas prices aren't good for the economy? Is it just that the oil executives aren't making their multi-million dollar profits? And how come retail prices coming down from their inflated levels is bad for the economy when no one's incomes are going up?

So here's another question, how is it that Damien Hirst, one of the world's richest artists, who made £111 million British pounds selling his artwork at his latest auction (just his latest folks), how come he now has to "be mindful of the current economic climate." Just this week Hirst canceled the contracts of many of the poor sods that work for him for a measly £19,000 a year, 17 of the 22 artists that make the pills featured in a number of his works. However, "In June 2007, Lullaby Spring, a cabinet filled with hand-painted pills, sold for £9.65m."

Am I missing something here? Well, it turns out he wants to stop making his pill cabinets, but still...he can't find other work for these artists? All together their wages are a measly £323,000 a year.

According to an article in the Guardian, "Last week, Hirst admitted that art had probably become too expensive in recent years and said he welcomed the prospect of selling his work at cheaper rates in the present climate of recession." Hmmmm, seems to me he could just sell his work for less. How much less could he possibly pay his workers?!?!

I say it makes no sense and he's being a scrooge, breaking the news that by years end they'll be out of a job! It's shocking and despicable!

Bah Humbug.

Change

"Broadway Protest" by Jerry Spagnoli

Back in December 2006, Barack, Michelle and eight others were in Axelrod’s office in downtown Chicago. If Barack was going to run, he had to decide quickly, a point the group made by laying out primary schedules and game plans for fund-raising and building an organization. Insights were offered from around the room.

It was Michelle, Axelrod remembers, who stopped the show. “You need to ask yourself, Why do you want to do this?” she said directly. “What are hoping to uniquely accomplish, Barack?”

Obama sat quietly for a moment, and everyone waited. “This I know: When I raise my hand and take that oath of office, I think the world will look at us differently,” he said. “And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently.”

Obama understood, through his own search for identity, how America’s seminal struggle over race was part of a wider story, of a search for dignity and hope that defined the lives of countless people throughout the world. A battered America, he felt, was ready, even anxious, to prove the truth of its sacred oaths — liberty, justice and equality. To show the world. If, through his own ambitions, he could offer his country a chance to step forward, it might rise to the occasion.

What started as a story about race became a larger story, by day’s end, about America. The transforming promise of the nation, after all, is the idea of welcoming the stranger, the outcast, to a place of limitless possibility — a place where each of us might discover our best self, be comfortable in our skin and find a home.

Excerpt from Change by Ron Suskind in NYTimes

Wander in Wonder

"Katwijk-Bomen" by Ellen Kooi

"Celebration ... is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder -- the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know this."
- Martin Heidegger

A Useful Mantra

In Being Peace, the Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh has provided a useful tool for calming oneself in the face of stress, anger, frustration or fear. It is a mantra that in it's simplest form it can be repeated as follows:

Breathing in, I calm my body
Breathing out, I smile
Breathing in, present moment
Breathing out, wonderful moment

The full value of Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching is better understood reading his own words:

**

From time to time, to remind ourselves to relax, to be peaceful, we may wish to set aside some time for a retreat, a day of mindfulness, when we can walk slowly, smile, drink tea with a friend, enjoy being together as if we are the happiest people on Earth. This is not a retreat, it is a treat. During walking meditation, during kitchen and garden work, during sitting meditation, all day long, we can practice smiling. At first you may find it difficult to smile, and we have to think about why. Smiling means that we are ourselves, that we have sovereignty over ourselves, that we are not drowned into forgetfulness. This kind of smile can be seen on the faces of Buddhas and bodhisattvas.

I would like to offer one short poem you can recite from time to time, while breathing and smiling.

Breathing in, I calm body and mind.
Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is the only moment.

"Breathing in, I calm body and mind." This line is like drinking a glass of ice water - you feel the cold, the freshness, permeate your body. When I breathe in and recite this line, I actually feel the breathing calming my body, calming my mind.

"Breathing out, I smile." You know the effect of a smile. A smile can relax hundreds of muscles in your face, and relax your nervous system. A smile makes you master of yourself. That is why the Buddhas and bodhisattvas are always smiling. When you smile, you realize the won-der of the smile.

"Dwelling in the present moment." While I sit here, I don't think of somewhere else, of the future or the past. I sit here, and I know where I am. This is very important. We tend to be alive in the future, not now. We say, "Wait until I finish school and get my Ph.D. degree, and then I will be really alive." When we have it, and it's not easy to get, we say to ourselves, "I have to wait until I have a job in order to be really alive." And then after the job, a car. After the car, a house. We are not capable of being alive in the present moment. We tend to postpone being alive to the future, the distant future, we don't know when. Now is not the moment to be alive. We may never be alive at all in our entire life. Therefore, the technique, if we have to speak of a technique, is to be in the present moment, to be aware that we are here and now, and the only moment to be alive is the present moment.

"I know this is the only moment." This is the only moment that is real. To be here and now, and enjoy the present moment is our most important task. "Calming, Smiling, Present moment, Only moment." I hope you will try it.

***

Even though life is hard, even though it is sometimes difficult to smile, we have to try. Just as when we wish each other "Good morning," it must be a real "Good morning." Recently, one friend asked me, "How can I force myself to smile when I am filled with sorrow? It isn't natural." I told her she must be able to smile to her sorrow, because we are more than our sorrow. A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. If we turn the Buddha on, we are the Buddha. If we turn sorrow on, we are sorrow. If we turn a smile on, we really are the smile. We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to seize the situation in our hand, to recover our own sovereignty.

When we sit down peacefully, breathing and smiling, with awareness, we are our true selves, we have sovereignty over ourselves. When we open ourselves up to a TV program, we let ourselves be invaded by the program. Sometimes it is a good program, but often it is just noisy. Because we want to have something other than ourselves enter us, we sit there and let a noisy television program invade us, assail us, destroy us. Even if our nervous system suffers, we don't have the courage to stand up and turn it off, because if we do that, we will have to return to our self."

Aphorism

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
- Emily Dickinson


Sergey Chilik