reflecting this evening...... on the nature of acceptance...
ritual-dissolutionscanned and altered polaroid image
autumn, 2004
ritual represents the release of the soul from the bonds of attachment, allowing life and love to flow freely, without obstacle...
taking place near and in a river, with ephemeral materials (vessels made of porcelain, but left unfired),
ritual symbolizes the acceptance of impermanence...
enacted in the autumn of 2004,
ritual marks the beginning of a process which hermann hesse described as the
blossoming of the wound...
the process continues...
siddhartha's rivera reading from hermann hesse's
siddhartha (online edition)
"Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt, that he had now finished learning to listen. Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new. Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection."
(http://www.online-literature.com/hesse/siddhartha/11/)resources for the journeyhermann hesse,
siddhartha
bernardo bertolucci
, little buddha (dvd)
namgyal monastery (ithaca, new york)
naropa university (boulder, colorado)
... and remembering tea...cinnamon plum, from
the republic of tealove and best wishes,
jeanne
