Well, last week I claimed to not be afraid of a bit of chaos and energy in my photos. I’ll take that a step further with this one.
In Nepal in general, I think, and especially at sacred sites, pigeons are not reviled as they are here in the states (“rats with wings,” as they call them in New York). Instead there is some attitude that sharing with them brings good fortune. Here, early this morning, the coffee shop is not open yet, but the pigeon feeding has started in earnest.
OK, we didn’t spend all our time at Buddhist sites.
(And of course we spent some great time with friends.)
There is a lot of chaos and energy in the streets of Kathmandu. Luckily I’m not afraid of a little chaos and energy in a composition.
One thing I loved so much that my heart was breaking at the thought of leaving it: the texture on the walls, everywhere. And the color.
Seriously, on the last few days I photographed a lot of walls, just to compose with the textures. My wife, who speaks Nepali, could hear people asking, “What is he doing? What is he taking a picture of?”
But here it’s obvious, the limes, the men, the wall, the kid under the umbrella. Just another tourist with a camera.
This is back to the same morning I started out this Nepal series with, and not to far apart in time from that first post.
This man was a serious meditator. After his preparations, lighting candles here, he sat on what looked like a couple of rice bags — essentially the cushioning of a few grocery bags — on the stones and meditated by the stupa for hours. We walked around and around, counterclockwise, many times, and he was sitting there clear and peaceful.
Back to Boudha…
The old woman with the cane in the foreground walked around and around that stupa all morning, and she generally seemed to be enjoying herself on this festive day.
This is just one small facet of the huge experience of being around the circle of that stupa on that day. I’d like to post more. Stay tuned.
Such a shame to show so little, so low res, for what should be seen on a big monitor or as a decent print. Here’s a crop, unsharpened, from the 1:1
Another dawn, another sacred Buddhist site. This is more of a narrative thematic addition to the blog posts than an image that relates to the recent posts, though I suppose there is some relationship on more than one level. Several levels.
It’s not actually that we set out at dawn every day in our month in Nepal, as one might conclude from recent posts here. In fact it was too rare for us. We mostly stayed with Nepali friends, and the way meals work in Nepal is that “lunch,” or “breakfast” — Dal Bhat by any other name — is a delicious and somewhat elaborate meal mid-morning. Things don’t really get rolling until after that. Our hosts generously cooked some amazing meals for us at that time, and — unless we were already out wandering before that — we stayed around “home” for that. (Thanks Kamal, and all the cooks, and thanks Hari Pal for hosting us in Lumbini).
Lumbini, of course, is the Buddha’s birthplace. While I didn’t personally feel the power and presence of ages of aware intensity built up in the place — as I did in places like Sechen, Bouddha, Swambayunath, etc — my own sense of wonder was piqued. The Buddha was here once. Here. That big wave of waking-up that exploded across the lowlands of asia, which then trickled up the mountains evolving and spreading, started right here. And this dawn was beautiful. Actually, except for the big chunk of time we spent wandering around the “wrong” part of the park, lost and hungry during the hot part of the day, it was quite lovely and we were quite happy here. I have a lot more good photos of it.
There were some amazing monasteries, monks visiting from all over and in residence. The morning chanting in the garden was beyond amazing. I will have more images from here to post, but there are also other stories to tell.
Here is another dawn at another Stupa. It’s not just that it’s a different morning from the photo posted last; this place, Boudhanath, has completely different energy. This morning was my third time at the Bauddha Stupa; we spent a whole morning starting at dawn. All three times there I felt an intensity, an egoless happiness. My wife had to pry me away each time. I want to move there. Our friend Sarbajit lives there, right there. (and in fact this image is exposed from his rooftop). I don’t think he needs to meditate: it meditates him.
Except for the dead-on, “this is a direct photo of the stupa” images I was compelled to take over and over (some of them are in fact good!), the hundreds of photos I exposed there have a vast range of texture, color, mood, and in one insufficient word: energy. But within that multiplicity of experience, there is a commonality. There is the quiet, awake center.
People, many hundreds per day, circumambulate counterclockwise. It’s a parade of people of all ages; parents carry babies, and old folks limp slowly with canes. It’s a visual feast: clothes of all colors; birds; sky; changing light; prayer flags in the breeze; shops with all their dharma trinkets, art, and clothing displayed around. People feed the pigeons, which gather and disperse in huge flocks. I shifts and changes like mind, like life.
And right in the center of that, there is a focus, an awakeness, and a sense of devotion. There is the accumulation of the merit of centuries of that devotion and thousands of awake and focused minds. That seems to radiate, maybe from the center of the stupa. It’s hard to find a source for something like that. Probably there is no spatial or temporal source for that sense of energy that pervades this place — put it feels that way, “It’s coming from here, somewhere, now.” But no. It’s timeless. It helps me to realize it’s ultimately placeless as well. It’s something we make with our minds.
I’m just back from a month in Nepal, photographing and visiting with friends of my wife. Now they are friends of mine. An amazing time with Nepali people and places.
Visiting the ancient Buddhist sites (but also some of the newly built or upgraded ones!) was one of the grab-me-by-the-shirt-collar facets of this experience — and certainly one I will naturally attempt to convey through photography. There was an intensity to the experience of being in these old and well-worn deep places that will of course be beyond anyone’s skills, as a photographer, writer, whatever. It was intense in a beyond-the-ordinary way of intensity, something that tingled my skin and rang my bones like a bell.
On this day we woke well before dawn and took a taxi to this ancient stupa, Swayambhu and we stayed from dawn past lunch. I can’t remember why we left at all. I didn’t want to leave any of these places, but there was always something pulling to the next thing we had to do.
Regular readers of the blog will know that I’ve spent a good bit of my life and time exploring the resonances between physical spaces and emotional or psychic experiences — and that I explore the possibility of pulling some of that resonance through the two dimensional space of a photograph. What I felt in some of these places is beyond that possibility. I won’t pretend I can do anything like that — but time in these places in Nepal also showed me that my old sense of the power of a physical space or object was completely wrong and is now obsolete. So who knows…
Some other mind-blowing aspects of the experience I did capture: for one, the warmth of the people I now consider my friends. I did find a lot of their warmth came through in their smiles, in photos to be shared privately, not here.
Another poignant facet of this month was the experience of people shining through the brokenness of the world. Specifically in Nepal there are a lot of things physical and politically/socially structural that cause a lot of suffering. As many Republicans in the US want to “make the government so small it can drown in a bathtub,” the Nepalis experience what 20 years of a non-functioning, minimal, hands-off government does. There is no EPA, no traffic lights, insufficient electricity, running water, and garbage collection. And that sucks. The suffering from this is nothing to glamorize. The amazing thing is that the warmth and radiance of so many people shine through it. They are not buying assault rifles and hoarding cans, like many Americans in fear of decline. Actually already in a fallen-apart culture, many beautiful people shine through the brokenness like a bright light inside a cracked pot.
As a photographer, I found it trivially easy to document the brokenness. Conveying the shining-through radiance is another task altogether, and the coming weeks will tell if I’ve succeeded at that (beyond, as I said, private photos of friends.)
Stay tuned. Lots more Nepal to come.
I probably talk too much about meditation and photography, or Mind and photography. In a way, of course I would, since the two are hand-and-glove. Still, it’s pretty rare that I come up with, or post or publish, a photo produced during an intensive actual meditation retreat. The mostly steady two hours a day counts as a steady mini-retreat, but it still doesn’t approach the intensity of a real, long, retreat.
This is probably especially true these days, when my meditation technique is more focused on mind than on the space around. My long retreats these days are silent, with long periods with my eyes closed, and no camera with me.
This one though is from one of my old retreats, sitting with open eyes, and walks with a camera during some breaks.
This photo is to me a good representation of some aspect of mind and meditation. Even those super-quiet Zen Enso brush paintings, and other traditional Japanese and Chinese meditation-inspired paintings are also quite full of energy. I’ve said before that I find the kinetic art of Kandinsky, Klee, and many abstract expressionists to be quite representative of states of mind, and the kinds of states of mind that a meditator will spend a lot of time with. While there may be peace to be found in Mind, there is always energy, almost always some movement and dynamic quality. There is movement, and there is stillness. There is something like substance, and there is space around that. There is a figure, and there is the ground. So this seemed to me to be quite in accord with this retreat experience.
Physically this is the kind of thing that shows up after a winter when we’ve had a good snowpack, and it then mostly melts in the late winter. Lately our snowpacks in central Vermont are not reliable they way they used to be. We used to have one brown winter in maybe 10 or more, and now it seems we might get one good snowy one out of 5 mostly brown ones. It’s easier, maybe, but spooky and sad. This year I don’t hope to see very much of this kind of late February/Early March effect, but you never know. Maybe we’ll get some real snow. I’ve got a lot of these images stocked up, and maybe I’ll find more good ones to release.
But first there will be an entirely different project. With luck, the next images will be quite different. Stay tuned!
There are some images I have the opportunity to try over and over. This is right around the corner from my house, so I can experience and frame a visual experience something like this in many nuances: different light, different clouds and snow. In fact, I have a version of this in my camera right now, exposed about two hours ago. This one, above, was exposed a couple of weeks ago on a walk with my son and my wife.
There’s so much to love about Vermont, so much that triggers the mind to leap into other realms. What we’ve got here are some themes that work well: the multifaceted quality of many of the hills. The facets are large and small. For the larger ones, you go over a little rise, and suddenly it’s a new experience. This hill is one of the larger facets, but it also has small facets on its face. The long shadows of the trees to the west ripple along these facets.
I’m not sure if this will be the definitive image of this spot, but it’s certainly good enough to post for now.
I’ve been intending to post this since the leaves were just falling, and I almost got distracted by newer and more timely images now. But I think this is good.
I’m glad to still be spry enough to get down on the ground, even when the ground is freezing. This good old lens, a 60 mm Nikkor Micro, has been a real workhorse, and I’ve come to really love it. It’s been really good to get close to stuff. However I may be moving on, and I’m certainly moving on from that copy of the lens, which I’ve given away. It’ll be interesting to try the new (used) update, a 105mm Nikkor Micro. I’m a little worried that the longer lens will be harder to get as close to subjects. I may end up replacing that old 60mm Micro lens.
I’ve been really shaking things up lately: new (used) camera, and now a handful of new used lenses. I’ve also been studying the lens characteristics closely. I’ve got some good new images from working with the new things, and a large project in the works. I think this will be an exciting space in coming days and weeks — and then again a good burst after some work in March or so. Stay tuned!