Dimensionally Barrett

Okay. I don't normally do this; but I miss architectural renderings and in general just goofing with structure. This is actually for a friend's birthday card and now it occurs to me...hmmm, "birthday card"? Takes half an hour to knock one of these out? Just call me Johnny Hallmark, South Asian Office. Might not be a bad way to make a little on the side. This is such karma: how many times have I walked by gift shops with souvenirs and cards like this and said, "huh, maybe not a bad idea...." Oooooh, you better believe it; it might be an idea whose time has come!!! And there are so many more holidays here. Gee willikers, I best get to work! Order yours today (kidding...until I'm not! Keep your eyes posted; I might just be inspired.)

A few days ago, I had one of those fortuitous meetings or more likely, a reconnection, in one of those instances where mutual recognition is instant. Santosh Shrestha and I ducked into the Happiness Cafe to escape the downpour and sitting at the table adjacent to us was a yogi and a blonde woman listening intently to what he was saying. Since Santosh and I had spent the past couple of hours gabbing, it was a pretty quiet wait and of course, I kept overhearing snippets of conversation from the next table. For a bit, I thought I was watching one of those cases where somone dressed like a yogi is telling an attractive foreigner stuff for less-than-enlightened reasons. It happens. But then, the conversation kept returning to climate change, shamanism and a large gathering in the mountains. At that, I noticed two things, my mind opened a bit and I sensed a very deep, genuine caring from this yogi. After the rains ended, we made eye contact, and introduced ourselves and headed off ...

Yes, there will be others. One of the beauties of traveling as I've been is that I do set down long enough that I can knock out a few small pieces. At some point, this will be problematic if I set down long enough to do larger works. I'll leap that crevice when it opens. I am keeping a journal, of sorts, because I like to keep the hand/eye coordination going. Usually, it's quick, gestural stuff; in a couple of cases, I've gotten caught up in details of buildings. All that's for another time because what I'm working on now is a series of acrylic and gouache illustrations for a friend's book (which I need to hustle on since it goes to press right as I'm leaving). Santosh's book is titled "The Color of Life". He'd seen some some stuff I've been monkeying with and really liked. He asked if I'd be interested in providing him some images and I said yes. The beauty of that is that we both agree that poetry by its nature is abstr...

Padmasambhava's handprint outside the Asura Cave, Pharping Preface In the course of travels throughout Asia, we encounter crossroads of myth, legend, and the apparent phenomenal reality of this shared world of appearances. Much of what we see is the result of conditioning, predispositions, identifications, and projection. I've seen handprints, footprints, and self-arisen statues and syllables that are said to have grown out of rock (and I know of one such that's fairly well-documented); all of this, according to geophysical science is nonsense or fraud. Yes, yes, all these phenomena could be faked. Sure. Why not? Or they could be what they are? Sure. Why not?  But I want to look at these phenomena from two different perspectives. One would be the phenomenal/empirical perspective, subjected to geological analysis and the other would be from the hagiographical with all the salvafic and soteriological emphasis these objects and aspects of the landscape (caves, rivers,...

Samantabhadra/Kuntuzangpo In my  previous post , I ended with this: "The absence of fear is the beginning of love." Briefly, and this will be brief: love is not sentiment, nor is it simpering, cloying "I wuv you" emotionality. Love is directly realizing fundamental Being. Each recognizing it in the Other and finding no-self/no-other. There is no "how" to this. Oh, certainly, there are practices like tong-len, meditating on the Beatitudes in the New Testament, reciting prayers and a myriad techniques for training thinking and perhaps developing reflexes to respond with a degree of calm instead of apprehension; but these are only momentary. Is there a switch to a continuous response to events that is only loving? Personally, I am not so sure in one context; in another, is there anything other than love at work? In what could be called the Immediate Context, it often seems that maintaining a continuous, compassionate response to (or better, b...

From the Peace Pagoda, Pokhara, Nepal. I don't have the wherewithal nor the desire to rain on other people's parades. But I question what goes on in the subjectivity of other people. I know that from my limited, tiny purview, at moments unbidden, a silence descends. I call it Presencing, purloining Heidegger and Jeanne de Salzmann unabashedly. It Presences when I'm walking in the middle of a busy street, sitting around a table with friends, and sometimes when I do expect it; during meditation or taijiquan or any number of movement practices. It's not true, then, that it always arrives "unbidden", but often, that's the case. It's not some "feeling" or some kind of "oceanic sensation" of absorption into the Cosmos. It's much, much more than that; it's so very ordinary. I don't particularly feel this has anything to do with "me"; I return to this point over and over again. The "me" or the ...