Religious Experience at Quiapo, Manila

The early morning light seems to bring clarity to what we see. This weekend promises to be as perfect an Indiana weekend as one can want. The sky is clear, the air sweet with new-blown roses and bird songs, the air so light it caresses when later it would smear, and the sun still gentle lords it over all.
 
In the light it is easier to be brave and see what the dark harbors. I go back to those dark years in Manila in the late sixties to early seventies. The image of La Solidaridad bookstore still beckons to me from Padre Faura Street, a few corners behind the Hilton Hotel fronting Roxas Boulevard and Manila Bay. I'd take the Ermita jeepney from Plaza Miranda in front of the Quiapo church milling with people at all times of day and night. The plaza was the center of the world to me at the time. There color, movement, sound erupted and swirled like the very heart of being alive.
 
Quiapo Church is formally the San Juan Bautista Church but is better known as the shrine of the Black Nazarene, object of delirious frenzy every 9th of January, perhaps the iconic representation of Manila and the people of the Philippines itself. Chiefly men, but women and children, too, streamed from all over the country to form a sea of brown faces and flickering candles filling every corner of the plaza and the streets through which the statue processes in the same traditional path each year. Men in maroon and orange shirts jostled to take their place and help shoulder the paso or portable altar carrying Nuestro Señor Jesus Nazareno. "Sinisimba ka namin, pinapintuho ka namin, aral mo ang aming buhay and kaligtasan," chants the crowd. We worship you, we praise you, your teachings are our life and salvation.
 
Throughout the Catholic world black statues of saints are held in special veneration by local people. Why this is no one knows despite many learned books proposing all manner of theories. In France and Spain we visited pilgrimage churches of the black madonna. I have experienced something of the power of viewing these images, a phenomenon akin I imagine to darshan (darṡana, Sanskrit)—"seeing and being seen by God." While I no longer subject myself to religious orthodoxy I can't deny religious phenomena. They are incontrovertibly part of human experience. We have few enough moments of transcendence to lift us from the milling crowd to survey "the whole catastrophe" (as Zorba, the Greek calls it). Maybe we don't need too many. We need to walk the earth with solidly connecting steps most of the time but surely there are times too when we need a liftoff from the planet and get a rest from its incessant demands.
 
The statue was brought to the Philippines in 1606 by the first Augustinian Recollect friars who vigorously promoted devotion to the image. The suffering Christ and his mother are dominant themes in both Spanish and Philippine Catholicism. Maybe because life in the still largely agrarian country is barefaced suffering, Filipinos flock to churches on Good Friday to partake in the suffering depicted on the images of Jesus, his mother and followers. Participation is catharsis just as attendance at Greek dramas in ancient times provided a similar communal release for Athenians.
 
I'd get off where jeepney turns from the Luneta into M.H. del Pilar in Ermita. At the corner there of United Nations Avenue was an unpretentious bakery with a screen door that banged behind me if I forgot to grab and guide it gently to the jamb. I tasted my first whole-wheat bread there, an invitation that subsequently lead to my love affair with various breads of the world. I would buy a whole loaf and the baker would slice it on his magical machine to the thickness I wanted. Back at home I would spread a slice with butter. That too was religious experience!

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Landscapes of Earth and Spirit

Santorini on a Cloudy Day

A friend writes about escaping out her bedroom window when she was a little girl to wander the Arizona deserts under the spangled dark sky. Deserts are a powerful symbol for me. There is the story of the Little Prince who befriends a tiny bush with its one rose, an ingenious fox and finally a desert snake that bestows on him death and deliverance. I don't remember how I came by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's little fable but it came when my life was a desert and friendships the only mitigating element in the stark landscape.

I think I bought the brightly colored, thin paperback at the little bookstore, La Solidaridad, on United Nations Avenue in Manila. Like other Filipinos, I studied Philippine History in high school and undergraduate school but I don't think I saw then the bookstore's connection with the newspaper that Filipino expatriates in Barcelona published to attempt to improve the conditions in their home country. One of the contributors was Laong Laan aka Jose Protacio Rizal who seeing their propagandist movement making no headway decided to return to the islands only to meet martyrdom. To the end he believed in a peaceful solution but other Filipino reformers thought otherwise. Historians say Rizal's death, like the murder of the three Filipino priests earlier, led to the Filipinos taking arms to fight for their freedom. It took 350 years to arouse them to a definitive armed conflict. But they did not figure on a bigger country in another hemisphere taking on a weakening Spain to expand her own territories and push the borders of her power beyond her shores. The Philippines became a colony of democracy-touting USA for another fifty years but became one of the first former colonies in Asia to attain their independence from Western powers.

The bookstore was started by writer, F. Sionil Jose, in 1965. I didn't know about Sionil Jose either back then. I didn't know that unlike other Filipino writers who in the upsurge of nationalism were writing in Pilipino he chose to write in his adopted language, English. In the 1960s I was groping in the desert for something though I didn't know what it was I sought. I was naive beyond belief and my mind hopelessly unformed. Yet it knew more than I did. It recognized in that bookstore a kind of intellectual Shangri-la where light rained on the whole undefended landscape breathing life where nothing stirred. I encountered voices there that spoke to me of other ways of being, other ways of thinking and longing. They spoke of worlds larger than the cramped life I saw around me and I yearned for space and light. 

Like F. Sionil Jose, without realizing what I was doing, I was practicing my English. The bookstore was a lifeline that became the rest of my life and English my passport to enter those other worlds. In subsequent years I ignored the culture of my birth while eagerly exploring the new worlds. Now the discrete worlds have merged into a boundless panorama where East and West, European and Asian, are simple counterpoints in the Ode of Joy we are all singing.

But the desert remains, a place of renewal,  a reminder of space and possibilities where periodically I strip myself of accumulated encumbrances to see again what matters.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

No Hemingway, no Elmore Leonard

Today my lunch hour dovetailed nicely with the re-broadcast of Charlie Rose interviewing the two writers, Simon Schama (The American Future: a History) and Elmore Leonard (Road Dogs: A Novel). I am definitely not a fiction-writer but I was more interested in what Leonard had to say about writing.

For him characters are the main thing. Later on he drafts a plot in which his characters play themselves out. He told Rose he looked forward to sitting down to write each morning because he wanted to know what the characters were going to do in a scene. He likes characters that speak and apparently likes his prose to be as much like speech as possible. "If it sounds like writing, re-write it," was one of his 10 commandments for writing. He does research for his books but works hardest at creating characters most of him he grows fond of. He even resurrects them from old novels to play in a new book. He dislikes adverbs and indulges in no descriptive runs. His first rule for writing is not to disregard weather but he prefers weather to show up in what his character says or does. All these, of course, echo what gurus of writing teach.

Characters and plot are terra incognita for me. Worse I just am not drawn to them. I have always liked ideas, information, interpretations of experience, consciousness and its way of labeling energy bursts. I like unconnected events that draw out a line of thinking, not events connected into a story. Stories tire me. I de-activate my Netflix membership every so often when I feel glutted with stories. Then I refresh myself looking at nature or history or other documentaries. Nature documentaries can depict images of violence and death more intense than any human drama but somehow happening as they do in the "natural world" I don't get as involved. It is the exercise of human will that fatigues me, the endless cycle of greed, envy, pride, anger, lust, fear that people my own life so inexorably. (Unlike Leonard I like my adverbs.) Periodically I find a novel I like. Then I often read it in one sitting as I did Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I seek fiction when I want to escape from life. When life is not bothering me, I prefer the cool breezes from a travel narrative or new insights into the Trobriand islanders or other such nonsense. I much prefer nonsense to fiction. Both tell of ephemeral destinies but there is something god-like in viewing documentaries or reading or writing nonfiction. I love the objectivity or attempt at objectivity. Maybe this is why I have never succeeded in romance. It is too subjective. Let me see life through my eyes, not live it with my eyes.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Pan-broiled Chicken Platter

I marinated chicken that I had cut up in the Chinese style i.e. across the bone for smaller pieces than you would get if you separated the parts at the joints. I was going to make a stew with tomatoes and maybe artichokes and/or tiny Niçois olives. Today I decided to keep it simple and broiled the chicken on a dry, hot, no-stick pan, my favorite Cuisinart purchase. In the same pan I roasted a sliced garlic clove, two Roma tomatoes, an inch of zucchini, snowpeas and a few Romaine lettuce leaves. I sprinkled the vegetable with a South Island spice mix (with turmeric, onions, etc) and spray-misted the whole with extra-virgin olive oil. I like Pompeian because I like its full, fruity flavor. I am not like some cooks who avoid the olive-flavor in non-Mediterranean dishes. For me the olive oil taste goes with practically everything. But maybe this is because I often cook over very high heat. I love vegetables prepared this way and I especially love that the whole meal can be prepared in one pan. Nothing like properly burnt food for that crunch and umph-taste appeal!

Posted via email from Duende Joes

Biblical Prophets in History and Time

Bruce Feiler's Where God Was Born continues to provoke and surprise. His conclusions don't always mirror mine but the way he goes about interpreting what he reads in the Bible and what he experiences walking where the events in the narrative took place is compelling. That's one heck of a way to write a book!

As Feiler himself says, he needed to write the book. It was his way of getting back into the spiritual dimensions of his religion as seen through modern American eyes confronting modern realities of conflict and hope. 

Many of Feiler's ideas do resonate with mine. He sees Judaism as a religion taking shape after the Babylonian captivity of the remaining Kingdom of Judah. Forced to deal with the enormity of the disaster befallen their nation, the Jews reinvented themselves. Cut off from the Temple that had become the geographic center of their spiritual life, they began formulating a God that was not rooted in place. Synagogues took shape, allowing for dissonant voices to be heard as we now recognize democracy to be. Monotheism took a giant step into the modern age.

I have always been fascinated by Jews and Judaism. They certainly have maintained the trappings of tribes into the present. These are what define them, the source of so much conflict with everybody else and the source of hope for the Jews. Maybe this century can modify this and the other religions in the world. Maybe we can approach religion in a new way, not using it to define who are unlike us but help us see ourselves in each other. Maybe we can move from being rooted in nations to being rooted in our humanity, and beyond that, in our being all in the same ark.

In writing about the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Feiler pointed out that disasters for the Jews were seen as "precursors to salvation." Suffering some catastrophe was interpreted by the prophets and the people who listened to them as signifying God's disfavor and they mended their ways and tried to follow Yahweh's commandments again. I remember when AIDS broke out and some fundamentalist Christian pastors announced the plague was punishment for gay men's sins. Their proclamations were drowned out by voices that eventually became the majority. The immune system disorder was a disease with an etiologic agent. A person caught it not from being a sinful person but from acting in a way that the virus was transmitted to him to cause the illness.

We need hope when bad things strike. Without hope we can descend into despair and inaction. In both Christianity and Judaism (Islam, too, from the little I know), hope is a dominant theme. Everyone hopes for paradise after death, for the painful reverses to be righted on earth. From hope we created justice, human justice sprung from the human heart, limited and subjective as it is.

I am reminded of another book that put words to what was inchoate in my mind. Albert Camus' The Stranger (L'Étranger, 1942) ended with Meursault declining the priest's consolation of hope:

"It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still."

Commentators see in the novel's ending fatalism or existentialism—the meaninglessness of life. For me it has salvific power. We anthropomorphize life. Life is more than the life humans live, even more so, the life humans understand and know. I prefer the Buddhist description of conditions giving rise to conditions. When the temperature of the upper and lower air strata are so, moisture is sucked up and rain forms. Rain does not fall in response to prayer although our perception of an answer to our prayer can be compelling. 

Perception and emotion are human realities. I acknowledge their dominion over me but don't see that dominion as absolute. There are realities outside the conventions of human thought and beliefs. There be dragons there, certainly, for fools can make anything out of nothing. Hence the value of facts in courts of law. But facts exist alas only as perception so where does this leave us? We have an opinion on something. It is often somewhat true but Truth? Nowhere do I find Truth. It's as impossible to define as Being. The simplest way to point at existence is as evidenced by consciousness. I think therefore I must exist. But existence is not the fullness of being. Being is like God, some indefinable stateless state where no one is a citizen but all belong.

What I argue for is humility, acknowledging we hold opinions but that opinions don't hold us. It is acknowledging that our value does not depend on being right; it depends more on our being humble to know right and wrong are labels we give to phenomena we only partially understand. Like Feiler and people like Feiler, we are constantly rewriting history. History is not what happened in the past. It's simply the version of what happened by an individual or group of individuals subject always to Time. Give it time, Hoosiers say about the weather, and it changes. (I hear people from other states and countries have identical sayings.) Give it time and opinions just like the weather change. To go to war for something as fickle? Greater foolishness than this I don't know.

At the same time passions can forge our energies into something noble and great. Faith is powerful stuff. But we can choose what outcomes we want from the choices open to us. We can't let faith or passion lead us into the Valley of Death again and again, unless death itself, like disasters, can transform our anger into hopelessness, into facing today as it is, and laying ourselves open to something beyond ourselves, beyond our understanding, grace that too falls like rain. Perception, too, but maybe all is not foolishness if it leads to a more graceful way of living.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Acacia trees from the second-story window of my father's house in La Paz

My father's house on Burgos Street was two stories. We lived on the first floor which was elevated from the termite-infested ground by cement piers that ran around the whole structure, occasionally pierced by circular openings into which our poor female cat, Basura (garbage) disappeared when her uterus prolapsed. For days we heard her agonizing cries until she died. We couldn't get in to get her and even if we could we would not have been able to help her short of killing her and ending her agony. Vets were not part of Philippine life back then. Many Filipinos could not afford to take themselves to doctors when they got sick. They might consult an herbolario but usually would wait for the illness to run its course.

The Sumalapaos rented the second floor. My older sister, Merma, and I would visit the daughters, especially, the eldest, Ninon, who encouraged us to write pen pal letters to people around the world. She also encouraged me to start a stamp collection. For several years I collected the stamps from my pen pals' letters and also bought stamps on consignment from a philatelic shop in Manila. By the time I left Iloilo for Manila and medical school, I had stopped working on my stamp collection. I had several albums by then, displayed using Dennison stickers to lined black pages I bought from China Arts  on J. M. Basa Street downtown. I kept the albums in a secret compartment under the bottom shelf of my wardrobe and forgot about it. I had stamps from the Commonwealth era and I think the oldest stamp issued in the Philippines. After my father died, my mother razed the house down and built the house of her dreams. My younger sister told me they stored the furniture and other stuff from the house in a storage room next to where my father's oldest brother, Tatay José, lived. José was reputedly quite the man about town when he was younger. He had many lady friends and I think he also owned a car when cars became available in the country. By the time I knew him he was old and eked a slim living by "inventing" contraptions like a water heater that he sold to his brothers and other strangers he could talk into parting from a few pesos in their pocket.

I remembered best the view from the second-floor windows of the Sumalapao family. Both the living room and the adjoining dining room had big windows facing the yard on the side of the house. In front of the yard was the biggest acacia tree I have ever seen. Three men could link arms to go around its trunk. It was said that Japanese soldiers were buried underneath it. Its leafy canopy merged with a slightly smaller acacia that grew on the side yard and whose branches spread over the shed covering the calesas my father owned and ran as a side business. From the second-floor windows all I could see were leafy branches of the acacia trees with the pink-and-white flowers and dangling, chocolate-brown pods. I don't know when I decided I would one day live on the second floor that was denied us when we were children. I do now live on the second floor of a condominium. Every year the ash outside the living room grows bigger. From my deck I could hardly see the lake any more but the leafy boughs do provide privacy from my neighbors, maybe a poor recompense for the loss of the lake view. But what I really love is the view of green boughs when I look out my window.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Acacia Trees at my father's house on Burgos Street

My father's house on Burgos Street was two stories. We lived on the first floor which was elevated from the termite-infested ground by cement piers that ran around the whole structure, occasionally pierced by circular openings into which our poor female cat, Basura (garbage) disappeared when her uterus prolapsed. For days we heard her agonizing cries until she died. We couldn't get in to get her and even if we could we would not have been able to help her short of killing her and ending her agony. Vets were not part of Philippine life back then. Many Filipinos could not afford to take themselves to doctors when they got sick. They might consult an herbolario but usually would wait for the illness to run its course.
 
The Sumalapaos rented the second floor. My older sister, Merma, and I would visit the daughters, especially, the eldest, Ninon, who encouraged us to write pen pal letters to people around the world. She also encouraged me to start a stamp collection. For several years I collected the stamps from my pen pals' letters and also bought stamps on consignment from a philatelic shop in Manila. By the time I left Iloilo for Manila and medical school, I had stopped working on my stamp collection. I had several albums by then, displayed using Dennison stickers to lined black pages I bought from China Arts on J. M. Basa Street downtown. I kept the albums in a secret compartment under the bottom shelf of my wardrobe and forgot about it. I had stamps from the Commonwealth era and I think the oldest stamp issued in the Philippines. After my father died, my mother razed the house down and built the house of her dreams. My younger sister told me they stored the furniture and other stuff from the house in a storage room next to where my father's oldest brother, Tatay José, lived. José was reputedly quite the man about town when he was younger. He had many lady friends and I think he also owned a car when cars became available in the country. By the time I knew him he was old and eked a slim living by "inventing" contraptions like a water heater that he sold to his brothers and other strangers he could talk into parting from a few pesos in their pocket.
 
I remembered best the view from the second-floor windows of the Sumalapao family. Both the living room and the adjoining dining room had big windows facing the yard on the side of the house. In front of the yard was the biggest acacia tree I have ever seen. Three men could link arms to go around its trunk. It was said that Japanese soldiers were buried underneath it. Its leafy canopy merged with a slightly smaller acacia that grew on the side yard and whose branches spread over the shed covering the calesas my father owned and ran as a side business. From the second-floor windows all I could see were leafy branches of the acacia trees with the pink-and-white flowers and dangling, chocolate-brown pods. I don't know when I decided I would one day live on the second floor that was denied us when we were children. I do now live on the second floor of a condominium. Every year the ash outside the living room grows bigger. From my deck I could hardly see the lake any more but the leafy boughs do provide privacy from my neighbors, maybe a poor recompense for the loss of the lake view. But what I really love is the view of green boughs when I look out my window.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Filipino Style Beef Potato Torta

From: "Creator@Google" <creator81@gmail.com>

Date: May 27, 2009 10:38:01 AM GMT-04:00

To: blog+twitter+tumblr+wordpress@duendejoes.posterous.com

Subject: Filipino Style Beef Potato Torta

A torta in Mexico is a sandwich made with bread like the baguette-like bolillo. In the Philippines, torta is a different animal. It is most often made with ground beef mixed with beaten duck egg (duck egg rises and incorporates more air than chicken egg) and fried with lard on both sides. What I made here is actually more like a frittata, an Italian omelet, served sunny-side-up, topped with grated Cheddar cheese and finished by broiling in the oven.

I love the linguistic connections of food, how similar culinary creations are prepared in different ways in different cultures, the differences owing to cultural preferences and more important available ingredients. The torta I most often make combines various cooking styles. I fry sliced Spanish onions in olive oil, add julienned potatoes and raisins, then in the same cast-iron pan, pour in the potato mixed with beaten egg and cook until the sides are almost set. I transfer the pan to a 350° oven and bake until the center is set and the top is golden.

Posted via email from Duende Joes

Filipino Style Beef Potato Torta

From: "Creator@Google" <creator81@gmail.com>

Date: May 27, 2009 10:38:01 AM GMT-04:00

To: blog+twitter+tumblr+wordpress@duendejoes.posterous.com

Subject: Filipino Style Beef Potato Torta

A torta in Mexico is a sandwich made with bread like the baguette-like bolillo. In the Philippines, torta is a different animal. It is most often made with ground beef mixed with beaten duck egg (duck egg rises and incorporates more air than chicken egg) and fried with lard on both sides. What I made here is actually more like a frittata, an Italian omelet, served sunny-side-up, topped with grated Cheddar cheese and finished by broiling in the oven.

I love the linguistic connections of food, how similar culinary creations are prepared in different ways in different cultures, the differences owing to cultural preferences and more important available ingredients. The torta I most often make combines various cooking styles. I fry sliced Spanish onions in olive oil, add julienned potatoes and raisins, then in the same cast-iron pan, pour in the potato mixed with beaten egg and cook until the sides are almost set. I transfer the pan to a 350° oven and bake until the center is set and the top is golden.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Filipino Style Beef Potato Torta

A torta in Mexico is a sandwich made with bread like the baguette-like bolillo. In the Philippines, torta is a different animal. It is most often made with ground beef mixed with beaten duck egg (duck egg rises and incorporates more air than chicken egg) and fried with lard on both sides. What I made here is actually more like a frittata, an Italian omelet, served sunny-side-up, topped with grated Cheddar cheese and finished by broiling in the oven.
 
I love the linguistic connections of food, how similar culinary creations are prepared in different ways in different cultures, the differences owing to cultural preferences and more important available ingredients. The torta I most often make combines various cooking styles. I fry sliced Spanish onions in olive oil, add julienned potatoes and raisins, then in the same cast-iron pan, pour in the potato mixed with beaten egg and cook until the sides are almost set. I transfer the pan to a 350° oven and bake until the center is set and the top is golden.

Posted via email from Duende Joes

The vagaries of getting old

A friend wrote how he may be going through "aging panic." Each decade was better than the last but his 50s reversed the upward pattern. Are succeeding decades, if one were lucky enough to live them, going downhill all the way?

My sex drive, always vibrant and strong, is less now in physical action but remains alive and well in the mind and soul. I can't skip and jump as I used to but from a regular walking program at the gym I can walk longer distances. Still I wish I had skipped and ran more when I was younger instead of being what I was: too well behaved, restrained, even inhibited.

People talk about what we gain from getting older in exchange for physical losses. We do gain types of wisdom. It does not hurt as much anymore when we don't get what we want. In fact we often see that what we wanted was not best for us anyway. We find the silver lining that is all over life but we just didn't have eyes to see it. We let go many dreams.

As I watch other people grow old alongside me there are attitudes I don't want to let go. We don't let go all our dreams. We might even invent new ones. In his interview with Charlie Rose, Italian architect, Renzo Piano, spoke of "the pure force of necessity... that gives you force and energy to invent." We have to fight against complacency and defeatism. We need ambition and an indubitable belief in the importance of each action however small that we do take. We can't sit in a small room. We need our exchanges with others. We especially need contact with the young, our younger colleagues, the young people still in high school or even with babes in arms. We need them to remind us of the boundlessness of our perceived future. Their fresh take on life is Genesis-like. "And he saw that it was good." 

I agreed with Freud when he wrote that Eros was not just procreative sex. It is the impulse towards life. We may not any more pursue sexual encounters with as much craft or vengeance but the erotic is the engine of desire and attraction. It is a component of what we deem beautiful or admirable. We don't forgo relationships but we change the relationships we cultivate. No longer tight-fisted with our affections we may even spill some on ourselves.

Let us grow older not so much with dignity as with the youthful insistence that the world belongs to us and we to it. Let us produce and multiply to the very last breath. Let us not go gentle into the night.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone

Today's rebroadcast of Diane Rhem's interview of Dr. Verghese brought up ghosts from the past. By all accounts, Abraham Verghese is a success, the kind of success that many people might call a fulfillment of the American Dream. Senior Associate Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford, he had also earned an MFA from the University of Iowa where he attended the Iowa Writers Workshop. Both aspects of Verghese, physician and writer, resonate with me but it is the idea and the ideal of being a physician that I am going to address today.

One does not speak of "working as a physician." To be a physician is identity. Contemporary society is separating the role and functions from the man (or woman) but among my generation a physician was who one was. It's like the ordination of priests. The man is changed forever. He becomes a priest in the eternal line of Melchizedek. As the author of the Letter to Hebrews (7:1-10) has it: "Without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, like the Son of God he remains a priest forever." During my youthful formation, two professions conferred upon the individual a change in their very nature. A priest became not just any man; he was a priest who had powers to lose or bind things in heaven as well as on earth. Likewise the physician. No other professions were like them. Both were a calling. Something deep inside the man called him to a life that was going to be defined by what he professed.

Now a man past the age of sixty I look at my past more and more as simply "the past." I unravel the elements of my experience from myself, from who I was and who I am becoming still. I see that life more as an expression of laws of circumstance and conditionality, much affected as we are still by such pivotal insights like Freud's idea of psychic conditioning. Man's life is the result of the past, and for me, the result of more than his own past in the conventional way we understand personal past. Past events release energy that continues to reverberate in the present. Energy, like Melchizedek, resides in timeless space and that space the space between the right and left ear of a man, in consciousness, in his thoughts, feelings, memories, in everything intangible but experienced nonetheless. This primal energy is not perceived through his other five senses which are physical but endure as ideas, or, as Plato called them, Forms. Energy is in matter for matter to exist and change with time but it participates in the "life" of that material "thing" without itself changing. Change is a product of its existence but is not what or who it is. It is in the fullness of created things as well as the emptiness of space but is neither things nor space. It possesses nothing and nothing possesses it. Unidentifiable by name, it still is the basis for everything that can be named. It is not even being itself unless by being we mean ongoing action which once over is gone without a trace, like lightning or the reassuring rainbow after the storm.

I came into medicine by a story I used to tell myself and tell others who happen to ask me. As a child I was drawn to the sacerdotal role of the priests in my family's Aglipayan church. Back then, for me the priest stood as conduit between the practical realities we dealt with in life like death, illness, worries, losses, gains, etc and the inchoate reality of the intangible, what our beliefs and thinking process conjure into influential existence. I wanted to be a man of such power but, according to my story, I knew I couldn't. I was certain my father who forbid it. I don't have any actual memory of my father doing or saying anything to support this idea. He did not attend mass when my mother gathered us three kids to attend church at the town square every Sunday but I have no recollection of any statements my dad made about the church, God or membership in the church. His not going with us spoke more loudly. So I decided to become a doctor—meaning back then, doctor of medicine, a physician.

What I needed to do then perhaps was to support the young fellow and tell him he was okay just as he was. Instead he needed to grow behind the aegis of an identity that sad to say while benefiting both the physician and the patient he or she is treating devolves into impersonality. A man studying medicine begins to dissociate from himself, from the first day he steps into the anatomy lab to cut away at a gray-and-brown mass of what was once a person. The student’s focus is on learning to identify the component parts of the cadaver and pretty soon he learns to treat sick people as objects of both study and treatment. How can he otherwise deal with the sublime dramas that reduce other people into helplessness? Dramas of loss and death? The physician works to save life and to focus on saving it he pays no attention to anything else, neither to the age of the person he is treating, its sex, color, social position nor anything else that to that person and his loved ones matter.

Years later I could finally come out behind the persona and little by little gained confidence in being just myself, this once-upon-a-time lost little person who’s still lost but at least no longer needs to hide it.

Verghese wrote three successful nonfiction books before embarking on writing a novel, Cutting for Stone. From what I read about it, many of the details,  probably most if not all the emotions, come from his own fascinating history. Of course. We write about what we know and we know our lives best of anything else unless we are so introverted to see beyond the tips of our noses or extroverted to notice anything stirring between our ears. What we know is our story, and the most engaging story is our own made to fly even loftier through the art of fiction and makebelieve.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Where God Was Born

All tables at McDonald's this morning were occupied. Rain was falling steadily outside. With no wind, the drops were just falling as though someone was pouring water from the sky above. There is no trajectory to the raindrops.

The weather has always provided infinite curiosity for men and women throughout the centuries. Anxious for their crops to grow and survive until harvest time, l tried to divine the workings of nature. The earliest records of religious artifact concern their attempt to propitiate natural laws and invite abundant herds for hunting. Vegetables and meat comprised from earliest times human food. 

The Pentateuch's Genesis tells the story of Cain, a farmer, killing his brother, Abel, a shepherd after Yahweh accepted the meat offering instead of the vegetables. Thus animal sacrifices became the norm at the Temple in Jerusalem. It was only after the Babylonians destroyed the Temple and took the people of Judah to Babylon that Jews started to meet together in smaller groups and the synagogue was born. It was their tragic misfortune that remodeled their faith, now called Judaism after the Kingdom of Judah that King David ruled, and made it more civilized.

In his book, Where God Was Born, third in his bestselling series on the Hebrew Bible and biblical times, Bruce Feiler, was as usual eloquent and perceptive. Attendance at churches and synagogue may be falling, he wrote, but "Americans in particular took their freedom from institutional religion and set out on their own to reengage traditional texts."

This is the first time I've seen a description of the social phenomenon variously called "the death of God" that made sense. When I started exploring religious cultures in the mid-1980s, many 

Americans I interviewed already refused to think of themselves as religious. They preferred to call their religious practice spirituality. Back then, speaking of spirituality sounded like a renaming that didn't have substance. To rename religion was to deny its power on human lives and cultures through the centuries. Religion, to me, was a word fraught with another meaning. It was the bond between men and the divine, between the human world and the intangible kingdom that was barely invoked in ancient times but in modern times was more visible as studies in psychology, comparative mythology and philosophy advanced our understanding of the religious impulse.

I can now finally declare that I don't believe in a personal god like Yahweh or Jesus or Allah. To be able to do this took decades because not to believe in a father-like divinity that acted like a man, got angry like a man, forgave and held resentments like a man, went against the strong grain of such a belief. It was probably the appearance of the One God that galvanized peoples and led to the widespread growth of the  monotheistic religions. People could relate more intimately with a god like themselves and one such god could command the affection of people much more easily. Monotheism, along with the political and social developments of the times, led to the appearance and growth of modern nations and states.

After cementing my lack of belief in a personal god, I turned my attention to studying alternative religions. Back then New Age was big and I met many people who were drawn to New Age religions as well. New Age was the American follow-up to the introduction of Asian religions to American society. Yoga, channeling, holistic thought linking body and mind, holistic healing, naturalistic healing, etc became components of what really was a development in how Americans were rethinking religion. They were becoming like the Indians of old: each person was developing his or her own religious ideas and practices in dealing with life.

Religion was reborn in my life when I experienced a little satori at a nine-day vipassana retreat in Barre in 1986. That ended my dalliance with New Age. I had been studying other religious systems and already growing away from New Age when the vipassana experience occurred. I read about Sufism, Hinduism, Yoga and the writings of Christian and Muslim mystics. My experience at Barre moved me so because for the first time in my life I felt a kind of peacefulness that we prayed at the end of mass when I was growing up: "The peace of God which passeth all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God and the blessing of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost be upon you now and for ever. Amen." That was the peace I felt. It was real.

Thence I drew away from American Buddhist groups and began studying the Pali scriptures even as I continued to read about reinterpretations of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Before the Reformation, Christians depended on priests to tell them what their Holy Book said. Gutenberg's printing press allowed for the printing and dissemination of copies of holy texts. Europeans groew prosperous from their conquests in the Americas and Asia and educational attainments grew. People could read the texts in earlier and earlier translations. The Christian New Testament was being studied in the Greek "originals" (the Aramaic originals had gotten lost). I followed with fascination the debate and made my own assertions about Christianity and "God" from the secular, humanist point of view. I don't even know when I let go of the childhood belief that the Bible was "God's Word." I saw too many inconsistencies and inaccuracies to support such a view. All sacred scriptures were the product of human thought. People resonated with some of these writings because of the charisma of their writers or of the leader the writings documented. I believe those founders and initiators experienced "sacredness" in mind states that people nowadays can still experience and the route is through what we call mysticism in all its varieties as found in all religions.

Feiler's book is a fascinating story of a modern American Jew re-interpreting his Jewish heritage through a re-reading of the Bible. He remains, he writes, firmly believing in God and how the Bible can guide men and women towards a more enlightened communal life of compassion, kindness and generosity but he no longer takes what the Bible says as "the whole truth and nothing but the truth." Along with many modern Jews and Christians, he sees the Bible as written by men and the process of collecting and writing them a human enterprise. Like other human enterprises at best it shows the best knowledge that the writers had of nature and themselves.

Two things have always fascinated me: religion and "god," and this consciousness and personhood I call "I." I've long wanted to write a book for publication but could not decide which of this I would limit myself to studying to write something intelligent and systematically coherent. Maybe I should simply combine the two. After all the evolution of "I" went along with the knowledge and experience I gained about religious systems, the various ways humans have dealt with life's challenges through intangible ways, through their intellect and will (what scriptures often refer to as heart).

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Varieties of aesthetic experience

The appreciation of visual beauty is not all a given, sprung like Wisdom from Jove's brow full-grown. Like the appreciation of other arts, whether classical music or literature, our appreciation of visual beauty changes with experience. It deepens, it gains breadth. There is conventional beauty like a girl's pretty face or flowers or sunset and then there is art which comprises both the natural impulse and a contrived infrastructure of history, criticism and philosophy hat sets the foundation on which we can build our own work.

Shooting Greg yesterday changed my experience of what can be beautiful in photography. I didn't experiment as much as I wanted to with lighting although I did light him more sparingly to bring out the lines of the body and give more dimensionality. What I found most effective was to ask him to adopt postures he normally didn't use. Changing the arrangement of our bodies must affect our minds and emotions, too. Unfamiliar poses or poses dictated by someone else (the art director, for instance) can bring out a more spontaneous, more sincere response in us.

The body was my focus yesterday. This was also the first time I'd African-American models. The shade of skin was compelling. I saw body and face in a different light. It was liberating! There is beauty in more places in our experience that we have dreamt of. Maybe beauty is more an attitude and anything we experience with an aesthetic attitude is beautiful. Beauty is simply an attempt to capture the infinite faces of natural creation. With eyes attuned to finding it, we see the world as through lenses, abounding in beauty. Shapes and colors spring into patterns we call images and sometimes when the conjunction of lines, contrast, and color is particularly fortuitous we have something mythic, images that seem to draw from the deep psychic wells of our being. Mythic images bear messages from the depth that change with the person seeking them, the circumstances, the times. They remind us of the ground we stand on. From skimming helplessly in heaven we find a foothold in the immensely moving cosmos.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

New Model Shoot with Greg and Jazmyn

See the full gallery on posterous

I shot Greg with his girlfriend, Jazmyn, this morning. Both were excellent. I had trouble with the new lens, 24 to 70 mm, so switched back to my old standard, the 24-104 mm, for much of the shoot. Jaz was a powerhouse, alluring, seductive, fun. She was much help with Greg who was more reserved. She told me he was not like this usually. He did tell me later that he had no trouble being the center of attention. He could be center of attention for hours.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Renzo Piano on the qualities of an architect

Italian architect, Renzo Piano, was Charlie Rose' guest on May 20. I watched the re-run yesterday afternoon at lunch. You can watch the interview on http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10318

Charlie asked Renzo what qualities he saw among the architects he admired. Renzo dodged the question. For him an architect was many things and has to be many things to be an architect. "An architect," Renzo said, "is ideally someone with the capacity to make things." To make things you have to put on different hats. "At nine you have to be is a builder; at ten, you have to be a poet; and at eleven o'clock, you have to be a humanist. You have to be able to move from all those different things." 

An architect has to dream but he must be a pragmatist, someone who knows how to do things. "Fantasy is very important but "it's a bit like marmalade. It's good only little by little. And especially good when you spread it on a good piece of bread." 

He referred to "the pure force of necessity." Necessity "gives you strength, the force and the energy to invent."

Enzo comes from a family of builders but early in his life he thought he was limited just being a builder. His father couldn't understand his choice to become an architect. "My father watched me and said, why you can be a builder, why do want to be just an architect." 

I thought the conversation between the two had as much to do with any kind of "builder." An artist is a builder, a graphic designer is a builder, a filmmaker is a builder. They create things. An artist is an artisan. Both words derive from the Latin root ars or art. What might distinguish an artist from other artisans is the breadth of his vision and his genius for surprising conjunctions. I remember in a theology class in college being told God alone is creator. All others are artificer producing artifacts. We make things from what God provided those first six days of creation. An artist is simply someone who has access to those building blocks and intuitively and skillfully puts them together in such a way as to make the old new. 

Plato, of course, had a similar take. For him the truly real are the Forms of which manifestations derive. What we see, hear, taste—what we experience—already existed from beginningless time. If we can envision ourselves as a dot in the vastness of cosmic space, what we experience is that tiny bit of the universe caught in the cross-hair of that dot. We are "creatures" and while we can't create anything new we can "make" something that "appears" new from the infinite array of Forms already potentially present in time. Being creatures we live in space and time. We would not experience Space unless there was some "thing" in it. To make such a thing we mimic God's act of creation. Who knows, maybe Yahweh too was nothing but an artificer. It seems to me this quality of the Source of All Things was at the heart of Masonic beliefs. A mason is a builder.

An artist makes. At a more fundamental level, human beings make. Even when we are doing "nothing" we are doing no "thing". The artist is one who conscious of this deliberately shapes and fashions what he makes with ideas of beauty but the essential idea is this: we make. We can think all we want but it's just marmalade. We need the bread. 

Rene Descartes in Discourse on Method wrote, cogito ergo sum. Usually translated as, I think, therefore I exist, a less ambiguous translation might be, I am thinking, therefore I exist. Consciousness gives us existence but making things makes us human. An artist is a craftsman. He both thinks and makes.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Desirable Perennials at Harbour Isle

The first thing I did after moving to a condominium in 1986 was to dig up the lawn and put in a garden. The battle with the management company ensued the next several years until they resigned themselves to the borders I've planted around the entrance to my unit. It's been worth it.
 
I had a friend then, Don Choy, who had moved here from Chicago attempting to reinvent his life. It didn't work and he returned to Chicago but not before he helped me dig up rocks and gravel from what was a gravel pit, mix composted cow manure with new top soil, and put in the first foundational shrubs. Don had worked for years at Chicago area greenhouses. He was my first gardening guru, teaching me the names of flowering plants and shrubs. Half of those names I don't recall now. I tell myself I could always go to my shelves of gardening books if I wanted to find the scientific name of any of them but I've forgotten the names because I've allowed them to disappear from the garden.
 
I am a lazy gardener. I let flowering plants seed in the fall and watch where the new plants establish themselves the following year. My borders have always been crowded so it's a fight of the fittest. From having some 30 species, I now have half that number. The roses and dahlia went because they attracted swarms of Japanese beetles in the summer. Overlooking my Buddhist sensibilities, I used to drown dozens of the prolific eaters a day. I recently threw away the old McDonald beverage cup; I hadn't used it in years.
 
So what has remained? The original plantings of weigela are still blooming late each spring. My collection of hostas has dwindled but the day lilies continue to bloom throughout the summer. Hydrangeas are lately popular with gardeners. Mine grow gorgeous giant leaves but seldom flowers. Last fall the landscape crew pruned the spirea hard. I was glad because the two shrubs in the back had gotten so big they blocked the path. The new growth this year is smaller and more likable, almost elegant by comparison to the squat, plump shrubs they had been. During the 1990s when I went up to Saugatuck, Michigan in the summer I would stop by a greenhouses there full of unusual species and varieties. The curly-leaf spirea I bought was also pruned hard last fall. It is just now starting to bloom. Peonies had been the glory of late spring but since last year the pink peonies have started dwindling. Oddly enough the one dark red plant in the back is getting bigger. In early spring, the glory now belongs to the dwarf lilac "Miss Kim." They spread through runners in the ground and now occupy much of one border. They bloom for a couple of weeks and the garden is dominated by lilac, the air fragrant with their sweet scent that I associate with women's perfume.
 
The one plant I look forward to blooming each spring is the tree peony I bought from Wal-Mart half a dozen years ago. It is a slow-grower but the blooms are as large as a four-year-old boy's head, just gorgeous! I cut down the azalea a few days ago when it finally stopped blooming this year. I've had no luck with rhododendrons. I used to let the foundational viburnum by the front entryway grow into a tree the top of which reached the second-story roof. It was gorgeous and created the illusion when my friends or I would walk in the garden as if we were in the tropics. I sawed it down to three feet several years ago. I wanted to try growing more sun-loving plants. That shrub is starting to recover although I keep it low now. Grown for its foliage, in the spring the viburnum is covered with white flower balls. I miss those. They seed and now there are several smaller viburnum babies that show the typical, rounded shape and generous spring blooms.
 
The life of a garden mirrors a man's life. Preferences form in our heads and we make choices but the universe has final say on what works and what doesn't. Every morning I walk in the garden. That's my meditation on life as I see which plants are thriving, which have relocated themselves where they prefer to grow, which have gone the way of the giants who used to roam in our childhood fairy tales.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

iMovie '09 acquires FCP-like editing options

I finally got back to doing lynda.com tutorials. I want to get back into video-editing so I began by learning to use iMovie. I guess I am putting off using Final Cut Pro by learning the simpler program. In fact, my one completed video was edited on iMovie 6, many moons ago! Working on just one video from Garrick Chow's Tutorial, 'iLife '09 New Features, took an hour. Edits now comprise those that maintain the length of the finished video and those that modify them. I wonder how precise the Precision Editor is. It would be nice to be able to edit the clip precisely at the playhead position.
 
I am encouraged by what I've seen iMovie do so far. I wish I can go on but I need to do another chore before ending the work day at the gym at 5:30, an hour from now. Tomorrow is Trash Day. I need to bag tons of stuff from the garden closet under the stairs so I can move around there and make the space useful again.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Christopher Buckley's Losing Mum and Pup

At lunch I like to watch the Charlie Rose show. Today Rose interviewed Chris Buckley, son of Pat and William Buckley. Chris told Rose that he started writing the memoirs a month after his dad's memorial service. He wrote it "to hold on him longer and to work things out."
 
The interview hit several spots in my own psyche and memory (for as we grow older, memory constitutes more and more of psyche, I think). Twenty years ago I told a friend that our self-improvement path involved largely deconstructing our parents in ourselves. To understand ourselves we need to understand them and identify those parts of us that are them. Then we can theoretically choose who we want to be.
 
For years I've thought someday of writing about my recollections of childhood and life in the Philippines. There are a few more books by Filipinos about the Filipino experience but the field is sparse. The Filipinos are probably the largest minority in America about which the average American knows the least. Few Filipinos have excelled in the traditional fields that merit stardom and public interest. But its history and culture are unique in the world, not only because all cultures are unique but because of the 400 years that the country was under Western domination, first by the Spanish and later, for a shorter time but perhaps with greater impact, by the Americans. As we struggle to conserve flora and fauna I believe cultures need to be studied and preserved, especially the smaller ones nobody knows much about. It is in diversity that we can find those rare solutions when common-sense ones don't work.
 
Cat Stevens sang: "All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside, it's hard, but it's harder to ignore it." After Buckley finished his first draft, he went through the book and excised those parts he didn't feel the public needed to know. Asked by Rose why he wrote those parts, he said, "to get it out." To put ideas, and memories are ideas after all, into words is to give them being and reality. Once they exist we can throw them out finally. But the catharsis of verbalizing and realizing are in themselves creative acts. We can harness the creativity that arises from putting things "out there." Catharsis, after all, is about mobilizing energy, making stagnant energy fluid again, turning death-creation into life.
 
Memoirs, Buckley said, had to be truthful and people's lives should not be "sanitized." He made no apologies for the book. He quoted from Melville's letter to Hawthorne: "I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as a lamb."

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Predicting the Future of Work in America

As the Time cover story for May 25, 2009 sees it, "The Future of work" follows trends from changes we've already been seeing for several years, changes emphatically made glaring by our economic troubles. Nothing in the article came as a surprise to me. Most people would probably agree with Time's analysis. How accurately we are setting our directions is probably not what matters. We create the future so seeing where things are going we can alter its final shape.

Time sees employers providing fewer benefits like company-funded pension plans. I think we'll also see companies making employees pay more of their health insurance, maybe, as with retirement plans, make health insurance the employee's sole responsibility. What the government and private sectors work out in streamlining health delivery and its cost will shape how this is going to turn out. With everything else President Obama seems bent on changing, we might well see changes in health care this year.

Time sees the factory or manufacturing landscape change. The industries like automakers will survive but more and more as foreign car makers making cars for the U.S. market while we focus manufacturing on products requiring greater skill and technology to produce like cutting-edge biologicals and computer technology. We've led the way in these other industries that developing economies like China and India have the manpower and knowhow to do them more cheaply. Americans excel in innovation and in the foreseeable future, with our excellent universities, we should maintain the lead here. But less developed economies catch up. Wasn't there a time not too long ago when the U.S. were just a collection of states aggressively acquiring territory and not as concerned with its global impact?

Office work like technical support and customer service are now largely done abroad but key positions, again in innovative information technology and health care will continue to attract new workers. Health science and computer technology are the next big areas for industry and commerce. We shall need workers with highly specialized skills and education. We have a healthy entrepreneurial system, what people used to call "the American Dream." Our social, legal and economic systems still provide the best environment for an update definition of the Dream.

Time sees employees increasingly working from their homes and more people working as consultants rather than employees. The traditional route of "going up the ladder" in one's profession or career is changing. If more people work as independent contractors instead of moving forward career ladders will take on all kinds of directions and shapes, a multi-nodal pattern more complicated than the straight-line path many of us are still trying to resuscitate. Various career patterns can offer more opportunities to independent and independent-thinking individuals. In our affluent society (still perhaps the most affluent in the world barring small-country exceptions) workers have the opportunity to pay more attention to the quality of the lives they lives instead of just focusing on earning money and acquiring real estate and property. As women move into more leadership positions, leadership models can take on what were traditionally feminine approaches to decision-making. Women are more emotionally intelligent, more likely to lead by consensus, and have family-style values which are both practical and sensitive to human needs.

In the course of this fanciful meditation on how our world of work is going to change I was struck by how my new-found career in photography and videos already have these qualities. Time didn't mention this but I think America still leads in the arts and entertainment. These areas often go hand in hand with affluence and people having more time to be creative instead of putting their energies on physical survival, which is still true for most other countries in the world. I work at my own pace, at something I enjoy doing, manage my own retirement and other benefits, and work on both lifestyle and career holistically. With the new work paradigm, Americans might even add more wallop to philosophizing, redefining happiness not as a destination to be attained after death but as a goal for here and now.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

As I See it: Five Activities for Success in Photography

As I see it, I must do all five of these five activities for a successful business in photography:
1. Capturing images
2. Processing images
3. Website work - uploading, improving site
4. Marketing and sales
5. Improving capture and processing
 
Where I am now is still the first phase of #5. I have a lot yet to learn just about improving the quality of my images both in capture (composition, exposure) and processing. I've given myself a generous four years to achieve financial success in this latest evolution in my professional life but if I can I want to start achieving success by June 2010 and leave mastery for June 2013.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Richer color and details with the Canon EF 24-70 mm 2.8L lens

I couldn't resist the annual Canon lens sale. I bought the 24-70 mm L and started using it yesterday. I shot this photo this morning using a low F stop then increasing the exposure in Photoshop. The colors and details are rich. The best thing about it is taking portrait shots in the studio. Now I can get as close as 1.3 feet of the subject whereas the 70-200 mm required 3 feet. The new lens make my lens collection closer to completion. Now I just need a close-up lens, the EF 16-35 mm f2.8L.
 
Okay, I can stop joking now. One can't have enough lenses if money was no problem. I do need to stop at this point and get serious about shooting. I have two model shoots scheduled this week. I might cancel one of them so I can focus on the one model that I find really exciting. He is agreeable to doing artistic nudes and will even bring his own female partner. What more can I want?

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Container Herb Garden for Summer Treats

The morning promises to be as fair and beautiful as yesterday, and even more sunshine tomorrow! Yesterday afternoon, after a soak at the gym, I walked all around Keystone at the Crossing. The Fashion Mall was crowded with shoppers. I am always taken by how elegant and pretty the Simon mall is. The tile floor is always gleaming, there's a huge flower arrangement at one of the mall foyers, the shop windows dressed impeccably, and the shoppers, of course, walking fashion plates. There were a few Chinese couples dressed as I imagine they dress in the Chinese countryside but the many Asian young women are often very stylishly dressed, their glossy black hair framing perfectly made-up faces. From the looks of the mall and of the people there, one could hardly believe we were in a recession!
 
I walked to the top of the parking lot where there were no cars and shot the glass-and-stone-and-concrete skyscrapers on River Crossing. The sky was a radiant blue. The breeze was cool so I had on a hooded windbreaker. The wind gusted forcibly causing the fountain waters to wet the sidewalk. Geese posed as though they too were entranced by the weather on the meadow in front of the lake around which I usually walk. Yesterday was too pretty to confine myself to the lake. I walked all about. There is a kind power from ambulating on one's own. No glass between me and the world of sounds, sights and smell, I glory in the world bathed in springtime beauty. There were even moments similar to those I felt in 1986 when I visited California for the first time after my first Buddhist retreat. The heart was exposed. I saw a bird dart away from the car and the food it had in its beak fell. I felt its disappointment.
 
Back home, after borrowing my neighbor, Kelly's power washer, the deck glows like new again. Water-proofed and stained, it now looks like someone's leafy deck in some tropical paradise. Aside from impatiens in a large pot, I only have herbs in pots. Once they are bigger, I'll have plenty of herbs for salads, rubs and marinades! I have rosemary, basil (my favorite), tarragon, oregano, dill, fennel, several pots of Italian parsley, pots of mesclun and watercress. I toyed with the idea of growing tomatoes and zucchini, too, but the farmers' markets should more than amply supply what vegetables I'll want.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

The Discalced Carmelites of La Paz, Iloilo

Lilac still perfume the air as we walk on those rare sunny spring days. April was our wettest in 45 years. I think May will also break records for rain. The garden is enjoying all this rain. The flowers are more abundant. Even the Star of Bethlehem by the front door sprung dozens of blooms that glowed against the rampant background of pseudolamnia and mint.

Growing up in La Paz, a district of Iloilo in Central Philippines, my family (that is, my mother and siblings; my dad worshipped other gods on Sunday) attended the small Aglipay church barely fronting the town plaza. Between it and the sprawling, monolithic Roman Catholic church dead center facing the square was an area with a tall concrete fence all around and a tiny gate to one side. This was the convent of Discalced Carmelite sisters. They were dressed in a brown habit, a black veil and white wimple. The habit had a wide, black leather belt from which hung a large black rosary. For years, that habit was my idea of how the archetypal image of Catholic nuns.

I met a Carmelite nun many years later. At the time, Jean Alice was acting prioress of Our Lady of Carmel monastery in Indianapolis. By then I had all but forgotten the brown-garbed nuns of my childhood until the name of the order, not plain but "discalced" (barefoot or sandaled) Carmelite, the same order identified on the cut-iron top of the gate back in La Paz. Jean Alice and her sisters no longer wore the traditional habit. After Vatican II, monastics relaxed their use of habits. She also met me wearing dun-colored skirt and top, all different shades of brown. A friend recommended Jean as someone who could help me re-adjust to normal life after a nine-day Buddhist retreat shook up my sense of the real. She introduced me to the thinking of Teresa de Ávila and Juan de la Cruz. I wonder today if the small, Filipino Carmelite nuns in La Paz could have taught me about the mystical teachings of these Spanish saints. Then again, if they could have I would not have known what they were talking about.

These memories were called forth by my reading of the life of Teresa by English writer, Shirley du Boulay. Waking at four this morning I decided to read instead of trying to go back to sleep. Boulay's book is much easier reading than Teresa's own autobiography, Libro de la Vida. She utilized quotations from the saint's own writings which gave me a sense of Teresa in contemporary language easier on the mind's ears. Her description of Teresa's mystical states reminded of attempts to describe satori in the Buddhist tradition. Back in the 1980s, Jean and I communicated with each other well using the different languages of Eastern and Western mysticism. Shirley du Boulay's book early this morning brought back the power of those early exposure to what I now believe are naturally accessible human mental states. Not everybody has the the gift of mystical states but like ambidexterity or a gift for languages, the capacity for accessing mystical states is inherently human.

Since the 1980s I've re-adjusted completely to normal (i.e. following consensual norms) but now I feel I've lost something precious. Maybe as early memories come back to us, these other gifts too can return and enrich our lives at a stage when we can appreciate them.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

With a new step every day!

The trees say summer but spring linger in the cool air and wet days that we're having in Indiana. Going on a walk one day last week when the sun was shining I took this photo of the river from the bridge at River Crossing. Amazing! It felt just not long ago when all I saw were naked winter branches of trees and the gray water.

I have not posted in over a week. I have been reviewing what it is that I am doing. I am not happy at all with the photographs I have taken. They are too conventional. I have a few photos that I am proud of but I can number them on the fingers of one hand. Meanwhile I've started working on video. There is so much to learn in software processing but the bottom line lies on the quality of the images I capture.

Oh well, I can only start where I am. The lyrics of a George Gershwin tune, I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, comes to mind:

Begin today

You'll find it nice

The quickest way to paradise,

When you practice,

Here's the thing you know,

Simply say as you go...

I'll build a stairway to paradise

with a new step every day!

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Grilled Chicken and Veggies: A Tale of Two Face

Grilling is the perfect way to cook delicious, healthy meals. With a Cuisinart grill pan I bought at TJ Maxx for 20 bucks I have been able to grill indoors. I don't plan to shoot what I cook so I am always in a hurry to shoot after plating the food before it gets too cold to eat. Photography demands time to set up the shoot, find the right composition and exposure. Everything has to be just right, perfect, too. It goes to show how divergent what I say I want to do and what I actually do!

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Finding inspiration from what others have done

Mozart's Memorial, Vienna 2004

I have always enjoyed reading about or, as this morning, hearing on the radio how artists, singers, actors, writers, etc found their niche to display their talent and earn a living from the art of their passion. There are tons of materials out there especially today when media reach us through the air waves and ethernet as well as old standbys like books, movie houses, museums and libraries.

On Weekend Edition I heard about Elliott Yamin, "A Soulful Kind of Dude."  He placed third on the third season of American Idol and  is releasing a new album, Fight for Love, a compilation of love songs on May 5. He told the guest host, David Greene, "I'm still Elliott Yamin. I'm still the funky white Jewish boy from Richmond, Va." He had dropped out of high school,  went from one small job to another before getting his GED and was selected for the America Idol competition. He credited his mother, a soul singer, with much of who he has become. "She was my best friend." He wrote a song about her. She recently died.

Last night I watched Bruno Monsaingeon's Glenn Gould: Hereafter. I've always liked Gould's Back recordings. Recently I've fallen in love again with Bach and watching the movie last night relit my desire to brush up my piano technique from watching Gould playing, his face inches from the keyboard. Such a shame that he died (of a stroke) only age 50 but he lived intensely those fifty years. Still that reminded me how life can be snatched away any moment.

This morning, at the computer, I came across Screen Tests on the New York Times T Magazine. I watched Diane Kruger and Tom Cruise talk about their beginnings, elegant little videos show in black and white against a black background. Cruise spoke of cutting lawns, doing anything to earn money before he got his first break in Taps. He couldn't sleep, he said, "excited and concerned" that he might get fired. He knew nothing about film, only knew he wanted to be in it. 

http://video.nytimes.com/video/playlist/t-screentest/1231547258502/index.html?popup=1#1194839738529

These lines from Longfellow's A Psalm of Life always come to mind:

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublilme,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time.

The phrases and words may be dated - who now says "sublime"? - but the concept remains alive. We may not wish a marble monument to us or our achievement, a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize, but when all is said and done the life we live affect others that we come in contact with during our lifetime and maybe after we are gone. That being said we have to be aware what kind of energy we impart or leave to others. Are we going to in turn inspire others to push their boundaries and become more of what they are or are we going to impact only our own life, not join the stream of energies that are the human race?

We influence each other. We sadden each other, share our worries, share our struggles, inspire one another. In the end we realize we are all in this one boat together. Let's get on with our own dreams. Maybe we can influence someone else positively to make their own dreams their lives.

Posted via email from Duende Arts