Canada Geese

Took this today at Westlake park.

Beware of dog

Sometimes an off the cuff snapshot gets weird. Sheryl and I have both noticed that our cameras have an occasional "magic factor". There are other folks who put "magic" to good use with old polaroid cameras (I bought one recently at a second hand store, then couldn't bear to pay more than a dollar a shot for film). Some still use the "Holga"; a very cheap toy camera with plastic lens, light leaks, and all manner of aberrations to technically ruin your shots. . . or create a masterpiece which cannot be repeated. I'm working on breaking the rules more, and having some fun making bonehead mistakes with interesting consequences. I un-weirded the above photo quite a bit in photoshop, but then I liked the remaining bizarre color cast, and most especially like the way that the dog lined himself up behind the wire. Click on the photo for a much larger view.

After the rain

Liberation

Looks a lot better if you click on the photo.

Abundance

Have an abundant new year.

Eye Contact

One last time this year: Merry Christmas!

And Happy Solstice, Happy Hannukah, and we're indeed coming into the new year. Sheryl and I dragged a camera out in the rain tonight and tried out the new star-filter. Fun stuff. I only took one picture. Did not notice at the time that the address is number 13. Well 13 has always been lucky for me.

Santa Cruz at west cliff drive

This is one of my favorite places to go walking.

Some facets of "Siddhis"

Ok, I used a foreign word again. Generally I am in favor of good translations. There isn't a good translation of the word "Kundalini", so I wrote about it in a previous blog and Sheryl even interviewed me on video to talk about it. A Kundalini awakening is an experience of spiritual opening. Spiritual opening experiences sometimes result in "siddhis" which the Buddha called "special powers." Special powers can be distracting, confusing, or even tempting to get all mixed up in the details doing stuff like healing people, reading minds, foretelling the future etc. The Buddha suggested ignoring siddhis, ignoring any astral voices you might hear and so on. Why? He figured that siddhis were simply one more thing to get attached to which would prevent you from reaching enlightenment. He was probably right. Speaking for myself, I never set out to be a healer. My first reaction to it was of relative surprise-- it didn't seem to fit. I knew when I came into it that it wasn't the end of anything, wasn't the point of anything, and that it should not distract me from further developing myself spiritually. Currently I'm assuming that being a practicing healer is a good way to teach me to be a more compassionate man and also to teach me greater humility. There are probably some other lessons in there, not the least of which is to teach me some acceptance, and actually love of how things are.

Sheryl and I try not to call ourselves psychic, but we do use that skill. Recently I told a client thousands of miles away the name of somebody close to them, and also some precise details which can easily be verified (actually the bulk of those details were verified instantly). The client seemed impressed. I don't know why I did that, but I can guess: I did it so that the client would be impressed. The relative usefulness of giving a client useless information that they already know is just to make them listen, to re-assure them that Sheryl and I aren't just pulling platitudes out of our asses. Of course, we do pull platitudes out of our asses but we charge extra for that.

Most of the time in a session I don't know why exactly I'm saying what I say, but I can't say anything else until I say exactly what I'm supposed to say. I'm not using siddhis, siddhis are using me. I just show up for the event, and hold the highest intentions for the client. Sheryl does that too, but she's also a really excellent counselor. I don't think she worries about siddhis any more than an expert seamstress worries about the unfair advantage of utilizing a top notch sewing machine. And good for her I say, good for me too-- we're just a little different in some ways.

Flower Mandalas

Maybe it's Sheryl's influence on me, but lately we've been shooting lot of flowers. This is not to be confused with the practice of "blowing up roses" if you're familiar with the Berkeley Psychic Institute. No, we just photograph them and as far as I know we have no incendiary rose fantasies. I don't always find roses to be the most symmetrical of flowers, nor am I always attracted to symmetry, but lately I am fascinated by plants, the way that they present themselves to the world and all their characteristics. In the meantime a renewed focus on macro photography is coinciding with a renewed interest in extracting truly perverse color from the poor dears in Photoshop. It might be kinder just to shoot them, blow them up, drive a stake through their hearts and dispose of the remains on a moonless night. After all, aren't flowers beautiful and colorful enough already? Of course. But I don't grow flowers, I take pictures of them. I reserve artistic license to turn the image into. . . whatever. I have lots of arguments with myself over this.

Ever notice how much a flower looks like a Mandala? Or vice versa-- repeating patterns growing outward; you might see five pointed stars enclosed by a pentagon in the middle of a five pointed star and so on. Crystalline structures are like that too: the macro representation of the form is an exact scaling up of the microscopic. The mandala is supposed to train your mind to understand the importance of that: of the interconnectedness of all that is.

Sheryl and I both went through a period of fascination with geometric forms. Sheryl is still drawn to images of tree branches. She keeps photographing them: not the whole tree, just the branches but she's rarely, if ever, satisfied with the results. I honestly suspect that it's the shortcomings of the camera, that it fails to capture some very key, yet subtle variations on a theme. I've noticed that people who have difficulty making decisions are often mesmerized by tree branches and they don't know why. It would do them good to lie beneath a tree just staring until they get tired of it. It's therapy, it's a mandala, it teaches the mind that as every branch reaches the sky, every decision reaches just as beautifully and gracefully into the future.