Between
phone calls.
Welcome –
a break.Half an hour
congregating.
Cheese and potato
warmed-pasty.Then
onwards.
To
another call.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Jung
Many thanks to the reader who sent in this quote. Love it.
I appreciate individuals, and groups, who stir to express themselves through artistic endeavour. I appreciate the, for want of a better word, the passion which has anybody opening up their doors and windows to allow themselves out into the public domain. Out there for scrutiny, open to scrutiny. To sustain that personal vulnerability over perhaps a life-time there must be something quite deep going on. I struggle to appreciate what that might be but perhaps the common theme is a wish to better understand ones own evolving inner process of thoughts and ideas. Whether it is giving our inner world expression through so called high art or everything else it doesn’t much matter to me.
And it is the everything else which has my attention. Even if I don’t really understand what is being conveyed on the surface level, I can appreciate something deeper. So what about these videos composed by a chap who practices within our Soto Zen tradition. I asked him how do I describe what you do. He said, after some thinking about it, abstract geometrical landscapes. I’ve picked out Japan Crossing because of the overt Buddhist connections as well as the connection with travel and especially travel by train. There are a whole bunch of these abstract geometric landscapes. Give them a go why not.
The videos called Bloodline of the Buddhas has a very direct link in with our spiritual roots.
This refers to the teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha and how it has been handed down through time in the Soto Zen lineage to the present. The soundtrack contains a manipulation of the sound of monks at Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey singing the daily Ancestral Line scripture.
Some years back this video was shown at a video festival (or what ever one calls such events) in Tokyo.
This post was inspired by an event I attended last evening. I’d cooked ‘tea’ for the main speaker and his wife so obviously I’d support the event, especially since it was just around the corner from where I am staying. The subject of the talk was a local Heritage Railway. I’d joined a room full of railway enthusiast, the steam era specifically. The emotion in the room on seeing photographs of trains in full steam was something to behold!
Everything else, in terms of creative human endeavor covers a lot of ground. Steam train fever, ice fever, knitting fever, philosophic ponderings, meditation? Passions can morph into obsessions of course. Along the way hopefully – deep personal fulfillment. Moments at least.
Chris maintains a personal blog where he posts photographs and links to his videos. There are recent images of snow in Norfolk. Weather again!
The next passionate endevour will be about knitting.
Yesterday evening the complete national press gathered at the venue the Ice-Masters board meeting where a decision was being made….finally the chair people emerged with a press release; it is not going through, there is not enough ice and the temperature in the coming days is rising. The rest of the evening and night (in the media) was spent on the aftermath: the country is in mourning. Dutch airline KLM had announced it would not charge for cancellation of tickets and had been in the process of arranging extra inbound flights to get people back to the country in time, but alas. Today weather forecast bulletins are starting to go back to normal proportions instead of hours and hours of speculations about every possible scenario. BUT, computer models show the possibility of low temperatures end of next week, in the history of the tour it has happened that the preparations were canceled twice and the third time it was on, so this is by no means the end of the ice-fever.
And all to do with the national obsession with ice skating. Innocent enough.
I just makes me smile inwardly to hear news of an entire population mobilise by something which is just plain fun. That’s to skate 124 miles, touching on eleven cities, on their frozen canal system, if the ice is thick enough. For long enough. Just that. In the mean time here in Britain we are caught in the iron like grip of icy blasts, deadly roads and multiple pile-ups. Just in the county of Cumbria there were around 100 road accidents between 5.00 am and 11.00 am. That was yesterday when we had freezing rain and the dreaded black ice.
What we Britain’s mobilise around is the weather itself. What ever the weather, we have something to say. We converse with total strangers on the street about it. We complain, bitterly. We are just MAD about the weather especially when it’s life threatening. The worse the better. We mobalise around adversity. Almost a national past-time. It will pass and life will return ho hum – rain.
This is for a good friend who slipped in snow and ice the day before yesterday. She fractured her fibular. Let’s be careful out there folks.
All the art of living
lies in a fine mingling
of letting go
and holding on.
Henry Ellis.