I Wonder How Many People in This City
I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when i look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.
—Leonard Cohen from The Spice Box of the Earth
Thank you for the photo, theshipthatflew & nevver: Lake Shore Drive, 1956
Silence is unceasing eloquence. It is the best language.
Dorothea Lange, Hopi Man, 1926. Thank you, kvetchlandia.
Olivia Hussey in Romeo & Juliet (1968, dir. Franco Zeffirelli). Thank you, oldhollywood & avanishedtime via.
Edward Clark, “Painting Sacré-Coeur from the Ancient Rue Norvins in Montmartre, Paris, 1946, from The Great LIFE Photographers. Thank you, snowce & avanishedtime.
(Source: m3zzaluna)
André Kertész, Self-portrait with Life Masks, New York City, 1976. Thank you, kvetchlandia.
When it comes to the teachings in Zen, one of the reasons why the teachings seem so paradoxical, and so hard to understand, is exactly because of this point. Within the teachings themselves, there’s always the effort to indicate that you can never pin the teaching down as this or that particular set of beliefs. It’s possible that is the main teaching of Zen, the main contribution that Zen makes to the Buddhist teaching. Don’t hold onto anything, especially the teaching, and especially the practice. Because the teaching that you can hold onto could never be the real teaching, because the teaching is really just life. Life as it really is. Not as we imagine it, but as it really is, right where we are.
When there is no object, no person, no event, no thing in the world with which I identify, by which I’m caught – when there is no object and no observing self – then there is a flip into what, if you wish to give it a name, is the enlightened state.
(via stillcuriosity)
Seelenluft | “Horse With No Name.” Love this. Thank you, uncertaintimes & chairofbullies.
Zen mind is a simple mind. In this mind, there is a childlike innocence. In India there is a saying which goes something like this: the deeper the river, the less noise it makes; the shallower the stream, the more noise it makes. What is suggested here is that a person of depth has a certain quiet innocence about him. On the other hand, a shallow personality is more childish than childlike. From where does this simplicity stem? Religiously speaking, when people encounter something other than themselves, they stand in awe and wonder in the presence of something higher and beyond. Zen simplicity is a consequence of encountering the Buddha nature. As D. T. Suzuki has pointed out, the experience of satori brings a certain sense of passivity and the sense of the Beyond. The sense of humility, simplicity, and childlikeness are manifestations of a deep encounter with the Real. With the loss of ego, one becomes a conduit of peace and tranquility.
