12/31/13

Cheers to 2014 and THANK YOU.


Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

-Hafiz



11/1/13

Brave & Beautiful


To our neighbors:
What a beautiful fall! Everything shimmering and golden and all that incredible soft light. Water surrounding us.
Lou and I have spent a lot of time here in the past few years, and even though we’re city people this is our spiritual home.
Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs. And we made it!
Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.
Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.
— Laurie Anderson
his loving wife and eternal friend

10/20/13

Daggers


Daggers- In honor of Manjushri, the Boddhisattva of Wisdom. Cuts through ignorance and duality, severs duality and unifies.  Acknowledging the interconnection of every-body and every-thing in motion. 'The We of Me'....made for Love, Adorned

10/8/13

The Shambhala Sun Foundation Auction

Win this OM bell and support The Shambhala Sun Foundation. A great magazine and if you don't know it already- check it out.



10/6/13


9/13/13

Dagger


Zen teacher Taigen Daniel Leighton said,
"Manjushri is the bodhisattva of wisdom and insight, penetrating into the fundamental emptiness, universal sameness, and true nature of all things. Manjushri, whose name means 'noble, gentle one,' sees into the essence of each phenomenal event. This essential nature is that not a thing has any fixed existence separate in itself, independent from the whole world around it. The work of wisdom is to see through the illusory self-other dichotomy, our imagined estrangement from our world. Studying the self in this light, Manjushri's flashing awareness realizes the deeper, vast quality of self, liberated from all our commonly unquestioned, fabricated characteristics" 

9/7/13

The Four Reminders

Joyful to have
Such a human birth,
Difficult to find,
Free and well-favored.
But death is real,
Comes without warning.
This body
Will be a corpse.
Unalterable
Are the laws of karma;
Cause and effect
Cannot be escaped.
Samsara
Is an ocean of suffering,
Unendurable,
Unbearably intense.

9/4/13

Fukushima

I get lost in the news of the world. Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.





9/3/13

8/20/13

8/15/13

Karen Black


“Rafelson thought I might be too complex for Rayette, but I told him I’m essentially simple, that really everybody is essentially simple, that we are all just beings who, uh, be,” Ms. Black said in 1970, referring to Bob Rafelson, the director of “Five Easy Pieces,” and her character.
“Certainly Rayette can just be,” she said. “I dig her, she’s not dumb, she’s just not into thinking. I didn’t have to know anybody like her to play her. I mean, I’m like her, in ways. Rayette enjoys things as she sees them, she doesn’t have to add significances. She can just love the dog, love the cat. See? There are many things she does not know, but that’s cool; she doesn’t intrude on anybody else’s trip. And she’s going to survive. Do you understand me?”

7/23/13

Small Dark Jewel

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): "I was six years old when my parents told me that 
there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me." So said 
the Leo science fiction writer Greg Egan in his story "Learning to Be Me." 
Let's pretend that you, too, have a small dark jewel inside your skull 
that's learning to be you. It's a good metaphor for what I believe has been 
happening all these years: You have been gradually mastering the art of 
being the best Leo you can be. It hasn't been easy. You weren't born 
knowing how to be your beautiful, radiant, courageous self, but have had 
to work hard to activate your potentials. Now you're moving into an 
especially critical phase of the process: a time when you have the chance 
to learn how to love yourself with greater ingenuity.

6/15/13

Custom Garland of 108 Beads

I very much enjoyed making this custom garland of 108 beads. Based on the book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying written by Sogyal Rinpoche, Andrew Harvey & Patrick Gaffney, the garland is covered in an edit of the text and broken up into 4 sections representing the 4 Bardos. It begins with a mirror, and ends with 3 beads of Om Mani Padme Hung in script.

"Go to a quiet place and rob all your perceptions, and steal all the stars and planets in the sky, and dissolve them into the belly of emptiness, the all-encompassing space of the nature of mind.”

"Everything is spontaneously liberated in the absolute nature, like knots untied in the sky."

"The entire vision then dissolves back into its original essence, like a tent collapsing once its ropes are cut."






5/30/13

NYTimes Home Section (!!!) May 30, 2013

HUGE Thank you to Rima Suqi!!



5/28/13

5/3/13

Impermanence

'Whether we die enmeshed within our hopes and fears or free ourselves by recognizing the selfless luminosity of our innermost being, impermanence lies at the heart of all existence. In illness or health, life or death, the body is the greatest teacher of impermanence.'

3/12/13


2/12/13

A little bit of Tuscon...