Be gentle with yourself...

“When it comes to being gentle, start with yourself. Don’t get upset with your imperfections. Being disappointed by failure is understandable, but it shouldn’t turn into bitterness or spite directed at yourself. It’s a great mistake——because it leads nowhere—to get angry because you are angry, upset at being upset, disappointed because you are disappointed.”
--St. Frances de Sales

The good outnumber the bad...

Thank you, Patton, for saying this.

http://www.pattonoswalt.com/

R.I.P. Roger Ebert

So true, Roger...

Roger Ebert

June 18, 1942--April 4, 2013

BEAUTY: Sculpture--Mihoko Ogaki

Japanese conceptual artist Mihoko Ogaki's series "Milky Ways--Breath" features fibre-reinforced plastic figures of dying or dead people with entire galaxies or even universes inside them. Small holes in the surface of the figure allow star maps to be projected onto the surrounding walls. This simple yet profound image is breathtaking in its scope of meaning. The pieces are rife with the ideas of cycles, transformation, transmogrification, macro and micro, and our connection and place in the reality around us.

http://www.mihoko-ogaki.com/index.html

I am sure I have posted these images before, but here they are again because they are so relevant to the art of Ogaki.

Just a little reminder...

The Present Moment

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”
--Alan Watts

http://alanwatts.com/

I'll Say It Again

"Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again."
--André Gide

Unprecedented

“You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”
--John Green, from THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.”
--poem by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott

Let It Be

"Why do you have to translate and decode things? Just let the image be. It will have a special kind of reality that it won't once it's decoded.”
--Laurie Anderson

Self Compassion

“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.”
--Jack Kornfield

http://www.jackkornfield.com/

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.”
― Eckhart Tolle

...

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you."
--Rumi

...

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments but what is woven into the lives of others.”
--Pericles

...

“We all come and go unknown/ each so deep and superficial/ between the forceps and the stone.”
--Joni Mitchell

Veteran's Day 2012

"Regardless of feelings on conflicts past or present or military action in general, it is best to understand that the men and women who are or have been in the Armed Forces do not choose their wars, but they do their work no matter what the cost."

Donuts

I am currently very interested in donuts.

Specifically, eating them.

Oh, look. It's donut o'clock...

I Caught A Glimpse, Now It Haunts Me

“You see the beauty inside everything. It doesn’t last long—it’s either gone in a minute, you just caught it, or else maybe it’s something so big that you normally can’t get your head around it. Like the fog in your head clears out. The world stops being a puppet show and you see the real thing. It’s probably like that all the time, but you just can’t see it, except for those little glimpses.”
--Janet Fitch, Paint It Black

Ensō

The Japanese word ensō may mean "circle" but the Zen Buddhist concept it represents is far larger than a single word. It contains the ideas of enlightenment, cycles, unity, time, nature, the void, infinity, and the totality of the universe itself.

Imagine for a moment that you are man primeval, on a plane, looking out around you, with little or no linguistic skills, and certainly no scientific or objective knowledge of what you are seeing. Above you is a flaming circle, giving light and warmth. When that goes away, quite regularly as it turns out, it is replaced by a great white, glowing circle that inflates and deflates over a short period of time. The two of these things chase each other in a circle as they go from side to side in the sky. At night, the sky is peppered with tiny twinkling circles. On the plane around you, berries and fruits and flowers are circular. You turn in a circle, surveying the reality around you, as your body describes the shape of a circle, and you stand as the still point, the center of this circular universe. You are in the center of the circle. The still point of the circle is where ever you are. Plants grow, are harvested, it grows colder, tiny white cold circles fall from the sky, and then soon, the warmth comes back and the plants once again begin to grow. The circle of time. And reality is an endless circle which allows that to happen.

The circle is the first, original shape, the primary form, the sound of the universe...

"Everything comes around

Bringing us back again

Here is where we start

And where we end"

--Alison Goldfrapp

We are cousins of monkeys...

Your Primal Identity

“Close your mouth,

block off your senses,

blunt your sharpness,

untie your knots,

soften your glare,

settle your dust.

This is the primal identity.”

--Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching trans. Stephen Mitchell

“Close the mouth; shut the doors.

Smooth the sharpness; untie the tangles.

Dim the glare; calm the turmoil.

This is mystical unity.”

--Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching trans. Beck