Additions to www.duendearts.com

Brandon Butterfly

I have been quietly refining my photography and video website. Most of the additions are in the hidden sections like photos of my sisters' visit on the Family and Personal Photos page and my personal blog but I also started collating images for the Go Ahead Travel tours in the Travel section. Based on my interest and inclinations, travel images and videos have the greatest potential for earning money. I also resumed processing model images.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Returning to work and the plan for the next two weeks

My sister and brother-in-law left on Wednesday. I re-organized the house and office yesterday and today resumed work. I am going to first process the images and video clips from their visit into a small movie and slide show on duendearts.com and Flickr. Meanwhile I want to resume doing tutorials for Photoshop and start tutorials on videomaking, for starters, Final Cut Pro. I am joining my family again October 29 to return mid-November. The remaining two weeks I have in October I plan to use to clarify my work and career goals, while also rethinking what I call my "sabbatical." This is probably too much for the time I have considering that I want to continue the repair and re-organization work on the house and garage started by Arturo. All I know is that I need to get back to working on photographs and videos, while resuming my learning curve.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Living with Our Schemes in Wonder and Joy

Families at Play, La Alameda, Santiago de Compostela

Many times life throws us a curveball. Things do not work out as planned or anticipated. That's just life. As Scottish bard, Robert Burns, has it:

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

To A Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, with the Plough

Written 1785

In modern English:

The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leaves us nothing but grief and pain,
Instead of promised joy!

To live with wonder our appreciation of life comprehends both those schemes that work out as planned and those that don't. In fact, it often happens that the unplanned proves better for us than what we wanted. For desire is based on petty and fickle momentary feelings and thoughts whereas the universe of events and happenings is vaster than our three or four scores of wisdom permit us to know much less understand. The universe is really incomprehensible; that is, we are incapable by nature of possessing the knowledge and wisdom to control events and their outcome. We are tiny, finite creatures like drops of rain falling on the immense ocean of time and space that is the universe where for a moment we live and exercise consciousness and choice.

So with a little more wisdom (understood in our later years as "common sense") we grow to appreciate curve balls. We dream and plan our future but cultivate an attitude of wonder, willing and empowered by a capacity to be surprised. Living loosely and lightly we navigate the short span of our lives with immeasurable joy and delight. We acquire Burns' "promised joy."

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Spanish art and culture in Indianapolis

How quickly the reality of the present moment overtakes memories no matter how precious they seem to us. For thirteen days we were traveling through intoxicating landscapes of verdant mountains and valleys, crystal streams, rolling farms and quaint towns of Northern Spain. Our destination was Santiago de Compostela, a medieval center of pilgrimage that even today attracts hordes of people now coming from all over the world. Traveling the highways and roadways through Navarra and Galicia we caught apparitions of staff-wielding dark-clad pilgrims, with their nylon backpacks and space-age hiking boots as the ancient routes periodically emerged from the forest and farms into the modern age.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Travel brings out refreshingly new perspective

Cathedral Square, Santiago de Compostela

Travel away from the normative environment that we've grown blind to and we see the world with new eyes. Traveling for me is both exciting and stressful. Away from home I don't have the daily routines that comfort and inure. I go to bed and wake up at different times, to different places. As simple a change as this turns my world upside down. 

The Go Ahead Travel group to Barcelona and Northern Spain was composed of retired people, a few who still worked part-time but were for the most part retired, too. My sister was the sole person who still worked full time. When people asked me, I told them the same fable: I was on a sabbatical nearing two years. One co-traveler was a social worker therapist in New York. Merma opined: The good thing about being a psychiatrist is you can work as long as you want. She was referring to the comparatively less physical demand of working as a psychiatrist or therapist. One worked with the mind, usually comfortable sitting in a chair across from the patient or client.

For all intents I am retired. I just didn't want to acknowledge the fact. I am retired in the way I live one day after another. But I am also retired in a whole new way. I can consider other tasks and challenges being a regular member of the social-security-paying, economy-propping American citizenry I couldn't see or undertake.

One idea that struck me after I came home last Tuesday night was to look into moving my giant collection of books, DVDs, and CDs to a not-for-profit library/media center in the Philippines. I left the Philippines because I wanted access to a larger world where individual differences would be seen as valuable when the whole was seen completely. I felt odd in the small-world mentality where I grew up and lived. I stuck out and looked weird. I found the larger world in America. America is a big country but the vastness of the world humans lived, dreamt and experienced was to be discovered not in the coast-to-coast geography but in the books and media the country supported. The Fourth Estate is not just journalism and newspapers and magazines. The Fourth Estate comprises the various ways we communicate ideas. Today this is inexorably moving into the non-spatial realm of digital media and the Internet but in the 1970s when I first came I found the mind-expanding world in books and the arts and diverse cultures of the New World.

Books, digital media and the Internet are the vehicle by which I could help other Filipinos who like me don't fit in the narrow world of traditional Philippine society. I have this embarrassingly huge collection of media, too big for one man to use and digest. It can be a boon to a whole lot of other people.

The mind is a awful thing to waste, says a group encouraging educational opportunities for what used to be referred to as "Negroes" in America. I've long harped on values being central to how a person lives. I believe it is vital to the transformation our global societies require for people to have access to the total pool of history and culture that belong to us all. With this knowledge maybe we can move past sectarianism and begin to cooperate as one species inhabiting one small planet moving in a giant universe.

Posted via email from Duende Arts