Tag: faith

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india inspiration life Photography street photography

Morning Coffee Talk~ 11/365

Good Morning,

When you are like me and you love exploring this planet and learning about its inhabitants, then some places haunt you for years after you visit them. One of these places is Varanasi in India. You probably have heard of Varanasi, its floods of pilgrims, swamis, holy men and women, the river Ganga and its famous healing powers, great promise of immortality for those lucky ones who are cremated and released into its waters, or the miraculous healing to those who bathe in its folds.

I arrived there with an open mind, camera and great eagerness to document what I see. I saw and felt so much more than I could possibly hold on to, but to single out one topic from that journey for the sake of economy, it would be ‘faith’.

If you want to study faith, how people adopt it, how it leads their lives and actions, how it fortifies them against all challenges, then Varanasi is the place.

There is so much more to say about it, but I leave you with these 4 images for now until I dive into that world again.

Categories
LEBANON myanmar Photography

Taking your spirit for a walk~

I remember as a child getting very excited about the occasional long walks we took to our favorite monastery pocketed in the heart of the Lebanese mountain overlooking the valley of the saints. We walked for hours and felt the importance of our pilgrimage with every dusty step. It says so much about pilgrimages and the necessity of removing oneself from a current situation to meet new requirements for personal development. Walking up the mountain dictated a baggage free walk and a sense of lightness and freedom that only comes from surrender to a higher cause.

I look back with so much endearment to those days, the time of innocence and magic.

Day 47 of 365~

Image taken of a young monk Myanmar during my trip there last year.

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
art inspiration myanmar Photography Uncategorized

Where has all the Faith Gone?

elementals-myanmarwhere-has-all-the-faith-gone-myanmarbelieving-in-magic-myanmar7582df32-b71b-42b8-a035-d85207a4890dWhere is our religion?

Is it in the temples of Asia, or the mountain churches of Lebanon, the faraway tribes of Africa, or the monasteries of tibet? Is it in mosques? Is it with soothsayers? Is it with the self proclaimed healers and seers? Is it in the holy cities of our world? Is it in the secret science labs? Do our world leaders possess it?

Or is it inside each one of us waiting to be touched?

wonderings of a searching mind…

Categories
architecture art inspiration life Photography Tuscany

Day 8~ September 8th~ Tuscany

candles and stones~ Lucca~ Tuscany

Real faith is spending your days building what you know you will never see completed in your lifetime.

Categories
architecture art inspiration life Photography Tuscany

Day 5~ September 5th~ Tuscany

Cathedral in Pisa

We build giant cathedrals to prove our faith to the world, but isn’t religion best demonstrated with a small act of kindness?

 

Categories
inspiration life Photography story street Vietnam

Day 24~ July 24th~ Vietnam

turning to faith

In a world that is so rapidly changing and spinning out of control, more and more are finding their anchor in faith…

A worshiper in a Buddhist temple~ Hanoi~ Vietnam

Categories
lebanon life Photography

Day 21~ February 21st~ Lebanon

direct connection

At about age 5 or 6, my sister and I used to love playing house games with the neighborhood children in our village. We had an unfinished floor in our home that was still cement walls and bricks and we created our own pretend little world there. We had a basket tied to a rope from the kitchen window on the top floor and we snuck food ingredients down in it to create our own breads, coffee and other pretty disgusting recipes that we ate with total pride.  We also found there an old discarded yellow closet that we declared to be our very own church. We acquired all sorts of iconic pictures, crosses and religious signs and hung them inside the walls of the yellow closet. We would go inside it with complete reverence and pray daily for miracles. One day a miracle finally happened. We heard a big bang on the walls of our little yellow church that made it vibrate miraculously! We ran yelling in awe and in great fear with shaking knees declaring our religious status and direct connection to all that is holy. It was only a couple of years later that our neighbor Nabiha, the very same one who offered us the yummy bread from her ‘saj’, gigglingly confessed to have thrown rocks at us to make believers out of us.

photo taken: My daughter visiting a favorite church or ours in the mountain in Lebanon.

Categories
Photography

Day Two Hundred Sixty Three, October 12, 2011

upholding the faith

At any moment of the day, somewhere on this planet, someone is stepping out of their daily fog and taking a few minutes to try and send a signal, from here to there, from known to unknown, from visible to invisible, from earth to ether. The message is so simple as is their faith, a yearning to connect to something higher. Even in Shanghai, a city of 20 million, there are temples where you can find an incredible stillness and where people still uphold their faith.

photo taken: a man praying at the Jade Buddha temple (a very special place)