Mountain is a Mountain

"Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage, place where people have been humbled and strengthened, they are symbols of the sacred center. Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth and to realize the strength of unimpeded space. Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surrounds. The closer you come to the mountain the more it disappears, the mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it, its body begins to spread out over the landscape losing itself to itself."

"On climbing the mountain the mountain continues to vanish. It vanishes in the detail of each step, its crown is buried in space, its body is buried in the breath. On reaching the mountain summit we can ask, 'What has been attained?' - The top of the mountain? Big view? But the mountain has already disappeared. Going down the mountain we can ask, 'What has been attained?' Going down the mountain the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain disappears, the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain is realized. Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. "

"Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain."

- Joan Halifax (1942 - )
The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through
Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom

Subliminal Worlds

"'Can we perceive those inorganic beings, don Juan?' I asked. 'We certainly can,' he replied. 'Sorcerers do it at will. Average people do it, but they don't realize that they're doing it because they are not conscious of the existence of a twin world. When they think of a twin world, they enter into all kinds of mental masturbation, but it has never occurred to them that their fantasies have their origin in a subliminal knowledge that all of us have: that we are not alone.'"

- Carlos Castaneda (1925 - 1998)
The Active Side of Infinity

Edges of Dreams

"This is where we start.
We are creatures of words...

"...We are creatures of imagination...

"...We live on the edges of dreams
and the margins of thought...

"We live in the whisper of the page."

- Whiti Hereaka (1978 - )
Prologue, Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers

Beyond Thought

“Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?”

- Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977)

Liminal Beauty

"The question is not what you look at,
but what you see. It is only necessary
to behold the least fact or phenomenon,
however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth
aside from our habitual path or routine,
to be overcome, enchanted by its
beauty and significance."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Surface of the Psyche

“One cannot dream profoundly with objects.
To dream profoundly, one must
dream with substances.

...

Matter is the unconscious of form […]
Only matter can become charged with
multiple impressions and feelings.

...

The poetic image is a sudden salience
on the surface of the psyche."

- Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962)
The Poetics of Space

Photographs-Otherwise-Not-Taken, Taken

Inside of Library, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

"Nows within this now, rather like snapshots in an album. Each Now is separate and a world unto itself, but the richly structured Nows 'know' about one another because they literally contain one another in certain essential respects. As consciousness surveys many things at once in one Now, it is simultaneously present, at least in part, in other Nows. This awareness of many things in one could well exist in a much more pronounced form in other places in Platonia."

- Julian  Barbour (1937 - )
 The End of Time

Note. The admittedly busy title of this blog post obviously begs an explanation. I'll start by saying that it is inspired by a short email exchange I recently had with a photo buddy of mine (the Zen-master, Paul Cotter). In reply to Paul's kind comments about my recent "travelogue images," I countered with the suggestion that my favorite images from the trip are/may-be those I took with my iPhone and not my 21L-sling-bag's-worth of "pro" gear (the details of which hardly matter)! While I am not (entirely) convinced of the veracity of my claim (and others may differ), I have zero doubt that my iPhone gifted me many images that I will cherish in the years to come precisely because these are photographs I would otherwise have not taken! Some examples - click to see full-size:

View of a wall while waiting to be seated at a restaurant

Footprints on a beach in front of another restaurant

A view from inside the Novotel Auckland Airport
while my wife was busy getting us checked in

Frosted window inside restroom at the
Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park Visitor Centre

View inside a restaurant while being led to our table

Upside down view of one of the ceilings at the
Nadi International Airport in Fiji

Another (upside down) view from inside the library at
the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

 

A snapshot view of urban geometry while waiting
for my wife to pay the parking meter

A 5 sec exposure of a part of our boat ride to Milford Sound,
stabilized by my iPhone's computational photography algorithms

I have dozens more of these "Photographs-Otherwise-Not-Taken, Taken" images, all of which share this one salient pattern: had I not used my iPhone to capture them (embarrassingly easily by, literally, framing and tapping, and without any of what my wife describes as "glacier-paced compositional machinations"), they would all have been but fleeting moments doomed to be lost in the mists of memory and time.

Aoraki

Aoraki/Mount Cook, New Zealand

"When Cook-lamented, and with tears as just
As ever mingled with heroic dust,
Steer’d Britain’s oak into a world unknown,
And in his country’s glory sought his own,
Wherever he found man, to nature true,
The rights of man were sacred in his view"

- William Cowper (1731 - 1800)

Formless Void

"...your tranquil yes to the changing
over into the formless void
of the unlimited."

- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)

Element of The Inscrutable

"It has happened to me, while taking solitary walks through the woods of Baarn, that I would suddenly stop in my tracks and stand stiff as a board, overcome by a frightening, unreal and yet blissful sense of  standing eye to eye with the inexplicable. The tree there in front of me, as an object, as part of the woods, is perhaps not so amazing, but the distance, the space between it and me, suddenly seems unfathomable. He who wants to depict something nonexistent has to follow certain rules. Those rules are more or less the same one as for fairy tales. The element of the inscrutable, on which he now wants to focus attention, needs to be surrounded, to be veiled by a perfectly common everyday evidence, recognizable to all. The true-to-nature environment, acceptable to any superficial spectator, is indispensable for creating the desired shock."

- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)
The Magic of M. C. Escher