Miho Museum

The temperature and breeze yesterday was perfect in Cleveland. It brought to mind a special moment at the Miho Museum in Shigaraki Japan shared last autumn between Kohyama Sensei, Austalian artist Tania Rolland, and myself. It was only a moment, but it was one in which we all stopped in silence to appreciate the random act before us. It was also one of the highlights of my being in Japan. 

Garbage inside the atrium swirled around and danced before us, witnessing to the fact that wonder and beauty can be found in the most unexpected places. It felt a little sacrilegious to capture even a portion of it on video. I couldn't help myself. Like so many things in Japan, it was the circle within the circle. None of the museum's antiquities, not even the stunning architecture of I. M. Pei commanded a majestic quality such as this. In an instant I knew that in fact I was alive.

 

 Link:  http://www.miho.or.jp/english/index.htm

Cultural Garden, Cleveland, Ohio

(4'x4' BFA Nest Installation revisited)

 

Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), National Poet of Ukraine, looking on.

Killing The Buddha

  
What does it mean to burn a book? Not just any book. The Book, the Good Book: the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament, otherwise known to Christians as The Bible. Political or religious protests are typically done in public. But if it is a private affair, of a more sacrificial nature, can this sacred text be put to the flame without guaranteeing the eternal damnation of a human participant?

The pages curl back one to another, returning to the nothingness from which they came. The wind and flames unveil written language for what it really is: words, symbols only. But history and tradition are not obliterated, nor abandoned. In the act of destruction, their significance is heightened, transcended even.

The interplay of this extraordinary text and an ordinary act offers a simple comprehensible beauty, and becomes a metaphor of release from the double bind that is living in an increasingly litigious and spiritually bankrupt society.

 Though a fraction of its former self, nothing is gained, nothing lost. The book is bound with steel wire, acknowledging and reaffirming its significance. Sacred yes, but an oftentimes idolatrous object nonetheless. Wax is applied to make this reality more palatable.

  

With the hope of restoring its humility and approachability, water serves to further degrade the piece.

Rust hastens the approach.

"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." ~ Zen Saying

In other words.. when an aspirant of Truth becomes bound by the very zeal which drives their thirst for spiritual freedom, they remain ignorant and attached to religious fetishism.

Stone Binding

(Preliminary Studies)

What does it mean to bind stones? A stone being a solid material object, retains the history and evidence of time. To accentuate a stone's form is to reject an otherwise shortsighted dismissal of its physical being and account for the effects of time. To bind a stone is to elevate its inherent essence and to acknowledge its being as something more than an otherwise dumb and inanimate thing to be discarded. To bind a stone is to appreciate it, spend time with it, communicate with it. It is nothing less than becoming one with the stone through the deliberate concentration of awareness and attention.

(Cuyahoga Valley National Park)

To go out in search of stones to bind in their natural environment adds another deeper layer of realization in this understanding.

To go out into the stones' natural environment is to account for the environment. Full of intent, this may not be initially evident. After exhausting all efforts to find a suitable location, spending an afternoon with stones minimizes imposition and gives way to further observation and attentiveness. This overwhelming sensation of mindfulness is possible through the absence of self. There is only the stones in their environment.

The environment becomes an active participant, interacting with me as much as I do with it.

This interaction allows for my efforts to be made celebratory.

The stones are suspended above their source, destined to soon return to the water.

The light begins to fade and I walk away, denying myself the sight or sound of their final offering.

Visions & Ideals

The Great Buddha; Todai-Ji Temple, Nara

THE DREAMERS are the saviors of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers. Humanity can not forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which it shall one day see and know.

     Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage these are the makers of the afterworld, the architects of heaven. The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them, laboring humanity would perish.

     He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. Columbus cherished a vision of another world, and he discovered it; Copernicus fostered the vision of a multiplicity of worlds and a wider universe, and he revealed it; Buddha beheld the vision of a spiritual world of stainless beauty and perfect peace, and he entered into it.

     Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.

     To desire is to obtain; to aspire is to achieve. Shall man's basest desires receive the fullest measure of gratification, and his purest aspirations starve for lack of sustenance? Such is not the Law: such a condition of things can never obtain: "Ask and receive."

     Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your Vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your Ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.

     The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.

~ from As A Man Thinketh by James Allen (1864-1912)