These photographs are beautiful:
From the series Sufism
I hope that these photographs can begin to balance out all the images of burning effigies, violent Anti-American protests, IED attacks, and suicide bombers, that consistently appear on the covers of our newspapers and magazines. These images over time, will become a window into a world of music, dance, poetry, and above all Love in Islam, something we rarely see in the western press.
Aaron Huey, photographer
Thank you, findout.
Peering out of the windows of the International Space Station (ISS), astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson takes in the planet on which we were all born, and to which she would soon return. About 350 kilometers up, the ISS is high enough so that the Earth’s horizon appears clearly curved.
Thank you, aubade.
So tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
We can never control this one wild and precious life no matter how we try. We can, however, bring loving attention to it, see how we create and maintain the illusion of separation through unskillful thinking, and allow those moments of intimacy to grow and increasingly inform our life and how we live it. We cultivate this by learning how to meet those places where we hold back out of fear, aversion, clinging and so on; and in that attention we redeem those lost and suffering parts of ourselves, the life that we have denied or rejected. Working on this edge of our life we transform what we initially may have thought of as a problem into the gift it is; the gift of opportunity to live our way into a larger more spacious and more loving existence. This very edge of living is the wild and precious nature of life itself. And once we are able to relate to it as such, our life transforms.
(via darwinwoodka)
The master pianist Artur Schnabel once said, “The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides!”
The Tao Te Ching states, “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” The beauty, charm, and usefulness depend on what lies beyond ordinary sense perception - that which supports, surrounds, and informs the entire creation.
Antonio Frasconi, Overhead the Sun: Lines from Walt Whitman ~ Antonio Frasconi Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. From Vintage Kids’ Books.
Irving Penn, Peeled Apple, 2001. From melisaki.
When you meditate, breathe naturally, just as you always do.
Focus your awareness lightly on the out breath. When you breathe out, just flow out with the out breath. Each time you breathe out, you are letting go and releasing all your grasping. Imagine your breath dissolving into the all-pervading expanse of truth.
Each time you breathe out, and before you breathe in again, you will find that there is a natural gap, as your grasping dissolves.
Rest in that gap, in that open space. And when, naturally, you breathe in, don’t focus especially on the in breath but go on resting your mind in the gap that has opened up.
What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea.
It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.
