Tag: thought

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Morning Coffee Talk~ 9/365

Casting the net~ Malaysia

Good morning,

Some days like today, when the mind feels very busy like it is working overtime, thoughts flying here and there without any apparent rhyme or reason, I stop.

Stopping is not as simple as it sounds. I remember as a 21 year old, taking a trip alone to India with a the sole purpose of finding focus. Once there, I decided to take up a vow of silence for one month. I did that in the confines of an ashram in South India, and during that time, I discovered among so many things how busy the mind and the brain can be in a single moment. They are so much more complex than I ever imagined… So many lines of thought can act themselves out at the same moment and on so many levels of perception, some emotionally connected, some random, some related to past events, some future projecting, and others to do with immediate needs of the moment…

I learned to quiet my thoughts down to try and focus on one or two threads at a time. And that experience was a pivotal moment in my life that I can link back to when needed as life gets hectic and chaotic.

So today felt like that and I needed to cast my net on one single thought, and that was ‘thought’ itself.

Thankful for having the gift of choice to be able to focus on one line of thought… how amazing is that? Feeling grateful for being human today.

Wishing you all a peaceful and inspired rest of the week.

Categories
life Photography

Day Three Hundred Twenty Two, December 10, 2011

lightness

Imagine going through life with a light heart, having wings fashioned from humor, lifting off on a breeze made of hope, floating on a cloud of good intentions, swimming in an ocean of clarity. Imagine…

 

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Photography

Day Two Hundred, August 10, 2011

alone...

Someone once said: “you are born alone, and you die alone”

True words that cannot be argued. We arrive here alone, fragile, bewildered. We depend on our parents our caregivers to help us get through the first years, we search for companions along the journey to take away our loneliness and in the very end we face the unknown completely alone. No one can hold our hand then after the departure gate. Knowing that makes me value the people who have a place in my life so much more…

photo: a lone flower at castle Gibralfaro, Malaga, Spain

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Photography

Day One Hundred Ninety Eight, August 8, 2011

a walk in the sand

Being near the ocean can often cause a process of self reflection. It can slow one down into a state of calm allowing thoughts to float to the surface that were otherwise buried deep within. And good decision can be born of inspiration, an inspiration born out of rhythm, of repeating steps on the sand and the steady movement of waves beating on the shore…

photo: Walking on a sandy beach, Estepona, Spain

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Photography

Day One Hundred Sixty Four, July 5, 2011

in love with color

“when it is dark enough, you can see the stars” ~ Persian proverb

So simple, so true. Light a candle in the sunlight and you see nothing, light it on a dark night and it can illuminate you way. On a very grey, hot, humid day in Shanghai, I was walking the streets as usual and everything looked dark, dull, colorless with a thick almost black blanket of clouds covering the city. Then I saw a flash of bright color, and it was this bed of flowers that looked like it was lit up, on fire! And life is like this too. Every dark age the human race went through produce a new renaissance of art and vision. Every hard time we go through is packaged with its own ‘light at the end of tunnel’ next stage.

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Photography

Day One Hundred Fifty Six, June 27, 2011

It's a matter of perspective

It’s a funny thing our perception of size. When we are young we perceive our parents to be bigger than life, our homes and gardens to be a large domain where we build our memories and our planet to be out of this world huge. Then we grow up, and we go back to visit our old homes, schools, gardens and we scream, “who shrank my world?”! Our perceptions have changed!

And knowing this, I made up a technique that I  called ‘zoom out’ while growing up that each time I had to face a problem, an issue that felt so big it almost crushed me. I would mentally ‘zoom out’ and pretend to view myself in my home, in my village or city, in my country, on my planet, in my solar system, in my galaxy,  spinning at enormous speeds, and suddenly, as if by magic, my problem would shrink down to insignificance and it would no longer be threatening to me in ‘perspective’.

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Photography

Day One Hundred Twenty, May 22, 2011

Internal

There are times in our speedy and hectic lives when we feel drained, exhausted, worn out, a bit lost, dispersed, spent… On such days the recharging and healing can only come from one place. We are gifted with a pot of gold, it is part of our package deal. It has never failed me yet and it is so simple. It is about going inside of oneself, being internal, regathering, realigning, relocating and dipping into our inner strength. Taking the time to do this is priceless,  because living among the lost is not living at all.

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Photography

Day One Hundred Seventeen, May 19, 2011

Where to set our standards?

I write and I muse a lot about the question and fact of choice. Today, was no exception. I was looking at things from the angle of standards. We are given almost complete freedom as humans to choose how we align ourselves and what standards we set for our lives. Where do we draw that line? What in life falls below our standards? How firm are we about the line of separation of what we allow into our lives and what we deem unfitting to enter into the inner sanctum of our personal temples. In this defining line I find a safety, a protection and a promise to myself that I do respect my life that I was given. And in our ‘modern’ world today, nothing is more difficult than keeping high standards

photo: barbed wire, Dongchang lu, Shanghai

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Photography

Day One Hundred Seven, May 9, 2011

Looking beyond

We are born into this life with a huge credit, a grace period, a fuel of high energy to kick start our young life. In our young days, we are full of energy, full of enthusiasm, of a feeling of power, feeling almost immortal. We are also given free choice of what to do with this gift, where to invest it, how to manage it, spend it, waste it, grow it, give it, or simply watch it waste away. Then at some point, as we age, we begin the feel the pangs of mortality, this burst of power is not forever, our bodies are not actually invincible, and life on this planet may actually have a greater purpose. The most wonderful gift of all is the fact that at any point in our lives we are able to go shift gear and to go deeper into the search for what is beyond the seen. But how late is too late? Have we done enough to allow ourselves a sigh of satisfaction over a life well lived…

Just an early morning meaning of  life ponder.

Photo: Old man with hat and beard, Shanghai, May 9, 2011

Categories
Photography

Day Ninety Six, April 28, 2011

nothing is as it seems

This is a musing that has been with me the last few weeks, “nothing is as it seems”…

I was taking photos today and I stopped at the shadows reflected on the wall in the afternoon sun and contemplated again that we actually never see ourselves. We always see a reflection, a shadow, a reverse image of who we are and what we look like. The greatest challenge of all is to know and see who we are on the inside, the everlasting part, the part that inhabits the physical form. For that there is no camera, only the mind.