Natural Life - $80 Billion - 2.3 million "Let the Sentence Reflect the Crime"

Natural Life from Variable on Vimeo.

Watching Television and Missing the Show

 

"Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show."

 - Annie Dillard

The Wheel and The Quilt

(copyright) AAvary Mandala

"The Wheel is turning and you can't slow down. You can't let go and you can't hold on. You can't go back and you can't stand still. If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will" "But the spirit she moves me. In fact she pushes me along It's a patchwork quilt of a life can't stop the river Just let it roll." "Won't you try just a little bit harder? Couldn't you try just a little bit more? Won't you try just a little bit harder? Couldn't you try just a little bit more?" "A patchwork quilt of a life, memories embroidered on your soul" "nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile..."

Friends and Enemies

 

Gilgamesh and Enkidu

"It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business."

Mohandas K. Gandhi

 

The Standard Arkadian Version

compiled as a story in 1300 BC

The Epic of Gilgamesh

is

an ancient poem; it is

the story of two enemies who became friends

and elaborates the wisdom of overcoming hatred.



Amazement and Wonder

  

 “When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver 

A Box of Love and Darkness

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.

 It took me years to understand that this too, 

was a gift.” 

― Mary Oliver

Anxious, Devoted, Scrawny, Helpless, Powerless...

Anxious...so you're going to the hospital again, damn! I'm glad but worried. At first I told you not to go. You always have to go to the hospital and I thought maybe through meditation and exercise along with the blasted ugly medication the doctor prescribes well the combined efforts of all these good habits might set you on a better health course. Maybe this time you could avoid the pricks and pokes by well meaning and concerned nurses and doctors. But the fact is that your sleep time has been getting thin and scrawny. The doctor's appointment you kept this past week has proved your chemical makeup is out of balance and that if you don't get some sleep, devoted as you have been to making sleep happen you will be in trouble if your mind can't slow down; if your body gets so exhausted that it has to turn off. Who wants to go crazy because the mind won't stop and there is nothing you can do. No medications work, no meditative techniques help, no exercise or manual labor brings sleep. The Hurricane rests just beneath the lids of your eyes. There is nothing I can do for you. I feel useless. I feel helpless and I feel powerless. I feel angry and frightened and scared. Depressed, I don't think anyone really knows because I can't show it. If I give in to this sadness I don't think I can get myself out of it...so I keep on doing what I can to "help" and stay positive. I act on the outside like everything is all right but underneath all my happy behaviors is a stifled scream of fear of "wait a minute!! isn't there anything we can do to make this better?!!" I ruminate over and over again about how you told me last Christmas that this would happen. I can't forget the days we've lost to medication and to this blasted physical residual side effect of having brain cancer. I pray that you will find some relief. I don't have a prayer for myself I pray for you because there is nothing left that I can do.

Stairs: Projection Mapping

STAIRS projection mapping from sinicatv on Vimeo.