in all disorder a secret order."
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
A Pattern or Dance
Perhaps one of the reasons for this silence is that you have to know how to read music. For instance, the scientific article may say, “The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half in a period of two weeks.” Now what does that mean?
It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat—and also in mine, and yours—is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.
So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week’s potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago—a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday."
- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
Sunday, December 17, 2023
Lily Math
- Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)
Il Saggiatore
Monday, December 11, 2023
Illimitable Spirit
admiration of the illimitable superior
spirit who reveals himself in the
slight details we are able to perceive
with our frail and feeble mind."
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
by constantly shattering our
mental categories, force us to go
ever further and further
in our pursuit of the truth."
- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)
"What matters most:
What he had yearned to embrace
was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark,
the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
Wind, Sand and Stars."
- Richard Bach (1936 - )
Friday, November 17, 2023
Movement of Colors
In the picture, color creates the light."
Sunday, November 12, 2023
The Color Nearest the Light
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Theory of Colours
Saturday, November 11, 2023
Leaves, Color, Wholeness
"When we understand what order is, I believe we shall better understand what matter is and then what the universe itself is ... Learning to see … wholeness … not muddled or contaminated by words and concepts, is extremely difficult, but it is possible to learn …When we see wholeness as it is, we recognize that [its] seeming parts … are merely arbitrary fragments which our minds have been directed to, because we happen to have words for them. If we open our eyes wide, and look at the scene without cognitive prejudice, we see something quite different ... geometric wholeness is not merely beautiful in itself as an accompaniment to the beautiful color. It is essential, necessary, for the release of light. Color, far from being an incidental attribute of things, is fundamental to the living structure of wholeness. Inner light is not merely a phenomenon, but the character of wholeness when it ‘melts.’"
- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
Flying Leaves of Autumn
They take their time and wander
on this their only chance to soar."
- Delia Owens (1949 - )
Where the Crawdads Sing
Sunday, October 22, 2023
The Clearest Way Into the Universe
to lose my mind and find my soul.
...
Most people are on the world, not
in it — have no conscious sympathy
or relationship to anything about
them — undiffused, separate, and
rigidly alone like marbles of
polished stone, touching but separate.
...
The clearest way into the Universe
is through a forest wilderness."
- John Muir (1838 - 1914)
The image above was captured - or, more precisely (following on the heels of Kim Grant's superlative video meditation on the follies of doing photography while stressed; Kim is one of my favorite YouTube photographers: list here), was creatively seen while I was in a quiet state of mind - along a trail at the Niagara Glen Nature Centre I've been posting about recently. As Kim's beautifully eloquent vlog post says so much better than I am able to by using only lifeless words and a lonely image, it is only when we allow ourselves to slooooow down while doing photography, and let go of our everyday pressures and stressors (as I had the privilege of doing for a few happy hours last weekend while on a trip with my wife), that we can take those first steps beyond just "capturing" images to seeing them. Indeed, it is in those brief precious moments when we somehow manage to quiet the "chatter in our heads" (as Alan Watts liked to describe the constant internal noise we all live with as conscious beings), that the illusory boundary between "self" and "world" dissipates to reveal nature's bountiful creative possibilities. Thank you, Kim, for a wonderfully poignant reminder of the need to clear our minds and become one with nature and our surroundings, if only for a few moments 😊
Saturday, March 04, 2023
The Celestial Way
- Chuang Tzu (c.369 B.C. - c.286 B.C.)
Translation in Teachings of the Tao by Eva Wong
Wednesday, March 01, 2023
Into Another Intensity
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 (1888 - 1965)
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Eternal Energy
eternal energy which
appears as this Universe.
You didn't come into this world;
you came out of it.
Like a wave from the ocean.
So that in a way, when you look
deeply into somebody's eyes,
you're looking deep into yourself,
and the other person is looking
deeply into the same self."
- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
Thursday, February 02, 2023
Photograph-Not-Taken, Taken
without the perpetual transmutation
of all the forms of life,
the world would be static,
rhythm-less, undancing, mummified."
- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
Postscript. This lovely image was captured early this morning both before and after my wife and I took our after-breakfast walk through the neighborhood (a habit we picked up during the early "stay at home" phase of the pandemic, and which we still try to do whenever our almost-back-to-normal work schedules permit). The "before" part consisted of me simply noticing - then, more deeply "seeing" - this beautifully rhythmic dance of half-decayed leaves on display on a corner of a neighbor's lawn. More to the point, and by sheer coincidence, literally seconds before I "saw" this static-yet-living form, my wife and I were chatting about a book I reviewed over 10 years ago called Photographs Not Taken. As the title suggests, the book is a collection of short stories by photographers describing images that, for whatever reason, were never taken; of course, the book itself contains no photographs! I reminded myself of the (lessons in this) book after heading out on our walk without my camera (not even an iPhone!) and immediately commiserating about "another gorgeous dramatic cloud-ridden sky gone to waste!" A split-second later, my eyes fell on the small patch of leaves you see above. What did the intrepid photographer do? Nothing. I merely continued commiserating: "Oh, if only I had brought my iPhone!" (How has my muse put up with me over the decades?) The "after" part of the image started about a mile or so later, as my wife and I returned to our house to start our workdays; the book - and the siren call of the little patch of leaves - were both still firmly on my mind. I grabbed my "walk around" camera, ran back to our neighbor's corner house, and made sure that, today at least, this was going to be a "photograph-not-taken taken." 😊
Tuesday, November 08, 2022
Vibration of Spirit
manifestations of Matter, Energy,
Mind, and even Spirit, result
largely from varying rates of Vibrations...
...the higher the vibration,
the higher the position in the scale."
Three Initiates, Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece
Postscript. In February of this year, I wrote about how the morning walks my wife and I took together during the pandemic (which we could do since I did not have to commute to my regular office; something which, sadly, I've had to resume doing recently) gave me an opportunity to see and appreciate how much beauty our local neighborhood offers. Back then, I was mesmerized with the "hosta-leaf corpses" that littered the sidewalks near our house, and which appeared to glow with a preternatural inner light. To communicate a sense of what first drew me to them (i.e., their radiance), I rendered them using reversed black and white tones (a small portfolio is here). Almost a year later, as we approach late autumn, I find my eye/I drawn to the radiance - or, better, to the colorful afterglow - of decaying maple leaves. Just as the all-but-decayed hosta leaves stubbornly clung to life with a mysterious and inexhaustible energy, the just-starting-to-decay maple leaves are now doing the same, but are suffused in an ineffably iridescent brilliance! There is a palpable fire burning inside that refuses to let go! I've tried to capture this ethereal energy by placing the leaves on a light table (using one that is sufficiently bright to illuminate the veins of the leaves), and rendering the final image on a dark backdrop in Photoshop. Although, as with the hostas, my maple macros only partly convey the excitement I felt as I encountered individual leaves, much of my raw emotion remains (albeit only in "Stieglitzian Equivalent" form). The image above is an amalgam of the photographs in a new "maple autumn macros" portfolio. Enjoy 😊
Sunday, November 06, 2022
Signatura Regrum
all reasoning is also intuition,
all observation is also invention.
Sunday, October 30, 2022
Aesthetic Devolution
"The tides of time should be able to imprint the passing of the years on an object. The physical decay or natural wear and tear of the materials used does not in the least detract from the visual appeal, rather it adds to it. It is the changes of texture and color that provide the space for the imagination to enter and become more involved with the devolution of the piece. Whereas modern design often uses inorganic materials to defy the natural ageing effects of time, wabi sabi embraces them and seeks to use this transformation as an integral part of the whole. This is not limited to the process of decay, but can also be found at the moment of inception, when life is taking its first fragile steps toward becoming."
Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Effulgent Forms
- Ramana Maharshi (1879 - 1950)
Monday, October 24, 2022
Leaves and Paths
"In a forest of a hundred thousand trees,
no two leaves are alike.
And no two journeys along
the same path are alike."
- Paulo Coelho (1947 - )
Aleph
Saturday, October 22, 2022
Between Grief and Geometry
- Michael Frame (1951 - )
Geometry of Grief
Friday, October 21, 2022
Harmony of Autumnal Colors
is immediately excited,
and it is its nature,
spontaneously and of necessity,
at once to produce another,
which with the original colour
comprehends the whole chromatic scale.
A single color excites,
by a specific sensation,
the tendency to universality.
In this resides the fundamental
law of all harmony of colors.
...
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)