Musings on Art, Travel, Eating, and State of Being
From theguardian.com: “We dream about drones.” Take a look at this theguardian.com video. A teenager described his constant feeling of terror from the United States drones. He had a good reason to fear them. Earlier, his father and one of…
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The Other. A person that’s not me. A group that’s not us. In this contentious world of clashing religions, clashing beliefs, and clashing desires, the other usually is the Muslim world—to a lot of us, that threatening, sinister world of…
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We saw two Polish movies recently, both on Netflix. Ida The movie Ida one reviewer says is the best movie of 2014. Ida the movie regularly appears on the list of best movies of 2014. Take a look at this…
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I often get this urge to literally clean up my life a little bit at the end of the year. So, I rummage through things and throw those I no longer have use for. Not everything, just specific kind of…
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Back to the art studio, a place where passions run deep, usually unseen, undetected, until a provoking moment brings forth a torrent of intensity. I tried to copy a painting of Kokoschka, the bride of the wind. Here is a…
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I’m a dropout at the easel. I abandoned my painting classes. Perhaps because I could not paint realist pictures. Perhaps because I tend to drop out of things. Perhaps because of hubris. Hubris? Let me explain. In one of my…
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When I was young the Slavic languages, and the Eastern European peoples, particularly the Polish, were looked down on in the United States. The American melting pot in those days, demanded homogenization, conformity, deletion of ethnic traits. If only I had…
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I have, in my sporadic contacts with Polish arts, found them to be much more with it, much more experimental than the corresponding arts of Americans. I saw this biting individuality while researching my previous blog on Polish on some…
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Poet John Keats penned two famous passages of poetry related to beauty. The first Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all sparked a debate that started in the early 1900s and may not be over yet. I think that’s partly…
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Gloomy again this morning; foggy and cold. Some sun would be wonderful—they wake up to it just a few miles east of here. Why not us? It’s summer, after all. I do expect sun sometime this afternoon and, maybe, it…
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I buy a lot of carrots, the organic ones. I assume that since plants get much of their life out of the soil, roots absorb more of whatever the earth possesses. More than leaves and fruits, for instance, but I…
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I haven’t written a post in more than six weeks and I feel guilty about it. I have a couple of excuses, though. One, the April A to Z challenge was like a marathon. My posts were relatively short, but…
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“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” Zenrin Kushû (The Way of Zen 134, 222) “Entering the forest he moves not the grass; Entering the water he makes not a ripple.” Zenrin Kushû (The Way…
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All I really need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt. Lucy van Pelt A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. Jane Austen What do money and chocolate have in…
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Uncertainty and fear and ignorance about immigrants, about people who are different, has a history as old as our Nation. Luis Gutierrez This quote has no x words in it, but it carries the idea behind this post: xenophobia. Relatively…
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Words are loaded pistols. Jean-Paul Sartre Three haikus on words Words wash over us Like raindrops on fallow fields Soaking, sowing seeds. Words, like daggers, piercing Like wounds, pestering That vulnerable heart. Words imprisoned, imagined Imploding restless minds Take wings,…
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The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. Marcel Proust We all have to struggle if we want to be different from who we’re supposed to be. Conforming is easier. Who we’re…
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Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness. Carl Jung See no evil, hear no evil would be no way to deal with it, if you agree with…
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The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it. Marcel Proust Time. One dimension, in addition to space, along which everything exists. It ticks,…
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Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains. Diane Ackerman Our sense of smell is as essential to us as seeing…
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Through silhouettes in the Musée d’Orsay, looking out across La Seine to the right bank—we sense ambiguities, yearnings, drama. Paris fascinates. For its history, its architecture, its art, its natural beauty—all of which spared it from the bombs of a…
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