Tag: death

Categories
children contemplations Germany morning coffee talk Photography portrait

Morning Coffee Talk~ 5/365

Morning Coffee talk~ 5/365

‘The Future’: It keeps us up at night and occupies our thoughts at times, doesn’t it?

We have this illusion that we can control the outcome of the next moment with our actions, and yes we can to some extent, but so many times life throws you a curve ball and you stand in your tracks to reassess and make new projections.

And ‘Time’: do we really understand what that is and if it is endemic to our current location in space and life on this planet? I mean isn’t it strange that we all perceive it differently? And how amazing is it that a star we admire in the night sky has actually moved on in time and is no longer where we perceive it to be?

These are the ponders that never allow me a second of boredom. What a gift to be born without all the answers and be given the chance to live in the search for truth in this life.

What are your thoughts on time?

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 113.0K other subscribers
Categories
morning coffee talk myanmar Photography street photography

Morning Coffee Talk~2/365

This morning I woke up with thoughts of ‘repetition’. How life here on this spinning planet demonstrates this continuously, from the sun rising daily, to our constant heartbeat, the seasons, our in-breath and out-breath, day and night,… it’s all around us.

I will share a short writing from a few weeks ago:

We, humans are born on a spinning sphere,

into cycles of day and night,

of repeating seasons,

our cells multiplying,

the galaxies spinning,

around us again and again,

till we die, only to be reborn,

and it all over again,

this repeating eternal dance,

we call existence.

Myanmar~ Sunrise, 2016
Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 113.0K other subscribers
Categories
contemplations inspiration Photography portrait

On Possession~

_Y9AE1958 (1)

Possessions: What do we really, truly possess? We think of possessions as things we plan and hope on keeping permanently, and the more we have the more we want to collect. But in the end, does it really matter? Maybe we can call them temporary belongings, because that is all they are. When we leave this place, the only possessions we are allowed to cary are the immaterial ones. How much love did we invest, how much care did we give and get, and how much goodness lived in us? Maybe these are the fuels that will be needed in our onwards journey into the next destination if there is one.

Day 65 of 365~ 

image is a composite of a bird I watched this week and an old portrait of my daughter. 

Categories
contemplations Photography shanghai

The things we don’t talk about~

We get so busy with life that we ignore death. We celebrate distractions, the things that make us avoid the question of our own mortality on this planet and all the time treating something as natural as death as we would an avoidable inconvenience.

I wonder if this great fear stems from our lack of education, our inability to handle the unknown, not coming to terms with the inevitable, or the way our lives are more and more based in materialism.

Day 43 of 365~

Images taken somewhere on the Shanghai underground

Categories
lebanon life Photography

Life Had Other Plans in Store

We find ourselves on a planet of duality; where there is day, there is also night; we wake up only to then sleep; we feel happiness only to be followed by sadness; and where there is life, there most certainly will be death.

And we feel that life is sometimes unfair, unjust and we wonder why the timings are all wrong and the big question rises in us: “what if?”. We desperately try to reverse time, to wish we had taken one step differently, that we had made a different decision, and it leaves us wondering if destiny is pre-written. We turn to religion for answers, we question our creator, we get desperately angry, then we sink into a bottomless pit of sadness, only to surrender and then move on trying to lift our head high and catch the thread of life we tossed to the side when tragedy met us.

And looking back at my posts from the week before my beautiful young brother died in his tragic accident, there were most definitely subtle signs to prepare me for this. The titles and natures of my images spoke volumes to me before the event.

“It’s later than you think” whispered the ghost of tomorrows lost~

15803590759_c3db82413c_o

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mimokhair/15803590759/player/

“our fragile strengths”

15978506556_cf62e2972a_o

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mimokhair/15978506556/player/

This post is in honor of George Kheir, my departed young brother, a wonderfully warm, humorous, bursting with life and generous man who left a kind and beautiful family behind. May his soul rest in peace and go to where it was destined to be.

george and family

Categories
art CHINA contemplations inspiration Photography shanghai street

the never ending flow

the river of humanity~ a never ending dance
the river of humanity~ a never ending dance

They come and they go, the are born, they grow, they get old, they die, some say they are reborn, to live again, to age again and to die again. This begs the most obvious and age old question: “why are we here?”

Categories
Boracay inspiration life Photography

Day 24~ August 24th~ Boracay

sailing upstream

River salmon has a very strange life pattern. It hatches upstream, swims downstream towards the ocean, matures downstream and then swims back upstream against all odds and strong currents, struggling and even jumping up waterfalls to make it back to the place where its life originated and eventually die there. I wonder if that’s the amount of superhuman effort needed for us to live our lives as they were meant to be lived, against all what tries to drag us downstream towards the oceans of mediocracy. To live a life aligned to human purpose would mean going against so much in order to escape being  just another one amongst the lost.

Categories
art inspiration life Photography street Vietnam

Day 7~ July 7th~ Veitnam

and then we age

Aging is the celebration of us escaping death. Why does it scare us so much? Is the fact that we are nearing death?

photo: old woman in Hanoi

Categories
Egypt inspiration life Photography story street

Day 11~ March 11th~ Egypt

the children in valley of the nobles

 

Sometimes the now, the moment, the present, must take precedence over the old, the past, the gone…

We were at the valley of the Nobles, an area of stone cut tombs dedicated to the nobles and high officials of ancient Egypt on the west bank of the Nile, and near the entrance to the tombs, my attention was caught by wave of color and giggles. A group of children in bright colored clothing were trying to get my attention to sell me rag dolls that they fashion in their image. I saw their faces, began to speak to them in Arabic and I was suddenly utterly charmed by their effervescence and the tombs were forgotten. Life was calling and it demanded my attention. They took my hand and led me to their tiny one room houses, one house after the other, introducing me to their parents, laughing and running around me and the whole time singing a song that they made up on the spot about my name. It was a precious happening for me and one that I will carry with me forever. At that moment, I followed my heart and decided that playtime with the living is way more important than seeing the old tombs of the dead.

 

Categories
lebanon life Photography

Day 13~ February 13th~ Lebanon

imprinted within

I have been writing in this series about the wonderful history, the enchanting memories, the great mysteries that live in my home country, but it would be an incomplete story if I were to skip the part of history that has printed itself on my soul the most, the life changing part.

I will start the story at the end of it. I remember moving to New York after I finished my university studies and after arriving in the buzzing metropolis that I was unable to sleep, not because it was too noisy, but because it was too quiet. The last years I spent in my beautiful Lebanon were filled with noises of war, with the shrill cries of bullets, of bombs, and with the ugly smell of death. Experiences like these print deep in you, they do not just fade away, the are always there under the surface threatening to haunt you. My reaction to those memories and experiences is the same as all Lebanese people, you run away from it if you can (which I did), and you love life even more. I do love life more after living the long years of war, I value it so much more and every morning is a new burst of inspiration and a phoenix of a new and fresh start.

The Lebanese recent war started in 1975 and only ended in 1991.