The work is done...

...bitter aftertaste.

Redemption

Mango

Στην Ηλιαία -ένα ασυνήθιστα κρύο βράδυ για καλοκαίρι- έσκυψα και φίλησα το πρόσωπο σου. Χιλιάδες φαντάσματα πετάχτηκαν τότε μέσα απο τις πέτρες, χειροκροτώντας την πιο αβέβαιη πράξη που τόλμησε ποτέ κανείς.

Cover me with flowers

When all the empires fall away,

all that remains is

the memory of those precious moments we spent side by side.

Squares A and B are the same color

Cedant arma togae

"When the only tool you have is a hammer,

everything begins to look like a nail"

Δημήτριος Γαλανός

Εάν είσαι λογικός και άνθρωπος με πλατειά αντίληψη, τότε έλα σε μένα. Αν είσαι παράλογος, στενόμυαλος, λιγόψυχος και έχεις μυαλό σκλάβου, μείνε εκεί. Μείνε βάρβαρος, λαδέμπορος ή οινοπώλης, πούλα ρύζι και φασόλια. Εφόσον φέρεις το όνομα του πατέρα μου, αυτού του μεγάλου και καλού άνδρα, και καθώς ήκουσα πως είσαι οξύνους, θέλω να έρθεις εδώ σε μένα. Έγραψα στους πατέρες του όρους Σινά για σένα, αν αποφασίσεις να έλθεις. Πάρε μαζί σου ό,τι βιβλία, λεξικά και γραμματικές έχεις. Αν δεν έλθεις εσύ, θα έλθει κάποιος άλλος και θα γίνει κληρονόμος της γνώσης και της περιουσίας μου… Αλλά, παρόλο που βλέπεις ότι είναι δυνατά όλα αυτά τα καλά πράγματα, εσύ δε θέλεις να υποβληθείς σε λίγη δοκιμασία, αλλά είσαι και οκνηρός σαν να σε έσπρωξε στο λήθαργο κάποιο μαγικό φίλτρο. Αφυπνίσου άνθρωπε και γνώθι σεαυτόν. Γίνε Προμηθέας και όχι Επιμηθέας.

Όστις μανθάνει, και παιδεύεται, εκείνον εγώ αγαπώ.

I dream of a School that no one will learn by heart...

...but everyone will remember.

Ken Zen Sho

Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another. He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku.

Desiring to show his attainment, he said: “The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no relaization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received.”

Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.

“If nothing exists,” inquired Dokuon, “where did this anger come from?”

Operation salvaged

one thing i discovered these last days

the most important thing that a human being can ever give you is a glass of water

Desire and Dust

Clouds and Mirrors

fLUX eterna

If every man had exactly what he wanted, he would be no better than he is now.

Heraclitus offers a trenchant observation about desire when he tells us that realizing all our wishes will not change who we are; we will continue to live with and as ourselves no matter how much money, sex, power, or material goods we can accumulate and surround ourselves with.  We must become who we wish to be independent of the fulfillment of our desires. 

Montaigne said it this way:  “man cannot discover his needs by consulting his desires.”

I once wrote about magazine ad I had seen for the Visa credit card.  The ad copy promised:  “it’s not just everywhere you want to be, it’s everything you ever wanted.”  This claim left me speechless. 

Perhaps we have learned from Marx that the creation of desire is the most powerful tool a culture wields, for if society can tell us what we want, it has already begun to tell us how to live.  And so perhaps there is at least one version of what we want, a particular field of our desires, about which the claim in this ad is true.  

If so, our challenge may be to discover what, if anything, we want that Visa cannot provide us with.  How will we discover, beneath the distracting veneer of our transient desires, what we in fact truly need, and how will we discover whether there is a way to become “better than we are now” that consists in more than getting “exactly what we want”?

Bhagavad Gita

All is clouded by desire:  as fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust, as an unborn babe by its covering.

Wisdom is clouded by desire, the everpresent enemy of the wise, desire in its innumerable forms, which like a fire cannot find satisfaction.

Desire has found a place in man’s senses and mind and reason.  Through these it blinds the soul, after having over-clouded wisdom.

Set thou, therefore, thy senses in harmony, and then slay thou sinful desire, the destroyer of vision and wisdom.

Be a warrior and kill desire, the powerful enemy of the soul.

Herbstnebel

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief

DS

A picture is a thousand words!

Out of Chaos, Brilliant Stars are Born

Desert

durate et vosmet rebus servate secundis

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

but Sound without Words gave me Redemption...

Snow