Street Photographer – Vivian Maier

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A good street photographer must possess many talents: an eye for detail, light, and composition; impeccable timing; a populist or humanitarian outlook; and a tireless ability to constantly shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot and never miss a moment. It is hard enough to find these qualities in trained photographers with the benefit of schooling and mentors and a community of fellow artists and aficionados supporting and rewarding their efforts. It is incredibly rare to find it in someone with no formal training and no network of peers.

Yet Vivian Maier is all of these things, a professional nanny, who from the 1950s until the 1990s took over 100,000 photographs worldwide—from France to New York City, to Chicago and dozens of other countries—and yet showed the results to no one. The photos are amazing both for the breadth of the work and for the high quality of the humorous, moving, beautiful, and raw images of all facets of city life in America’s post-war golden age.

Thanks for the link Michael, much appreciated. I’d posted about Vivian Maier before however now there is so much more information on the website dedicated to Vivian Maier and her amazing work.

When All Seems Lost

Here is some home grown advice from an old (ice) hockey coach who when asked what to do when the game seems lost and you don’t know what to do, he said “Keep your feet moving”.

As we approach the new year and when the world seems so full of downward news perhaps remembering that while the game seems lost we can at least simply keep moving. And perhaps also to remember, and live out, deeper truths in our everyday lives.

Thanks to my Canadian contact for this quote.

Vulnerable Strength

This morning: The sight of a man pushing a baby buggy at speed along an early morning street. He wore shorts and trainers, it was coming on to rain and the buggy was empty. A burly man more likely to be twinned with a jack hammer, angle grinder. Or machine gun. Than a baby buggy. So delicate. And vulnerable in the hands of one so obviously brawny. Vulnerability coupled with strength, a tension’s there. Then a mental flash of him loosing it and hurling the buggy, thankfully empty, against a wall!

This morning: An interview on Radio 4’s Today program with two chaps. Quite different yet similar experiences following their tours of duty in the army. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. A terrible terrible thing. One man climbing out of being declared ‘insane’. Doing well now. The other ignored his wife, wanted to hit her but didn’t. Locked in the hell of undiagnosed PTSD. He didn’t know. Too ashamed to be weak. To seek a way out ’till his wife and friends helped him find it. Talking got him back on track. Doing better now. Both still suffer extreme flash backs. Still.

This morning: Listening to the radio interview and then stepping out of the car. Seeing the buggy pusher on the street followed snap!, snap! fast. O the brutality of what men, and women, go through in war. O how good and civilizing the sight of burly men pushing prams, with big hands.

A thought for those suffering with PTSD. Wars over there and wars closer to home, or in the home. This is a terrible terrible thing this PTSD.

Free To Decide?

Back in 2003 I sat by while the head of our order battled for his life in hospital. Hour by hour, procedure after incredible procedure until he said enough and we took him back to Shasta Abbey. He died hours after getting there. Life and death dramas are being lived and died constantly in all corners and mostly in private. The following quote is from thoughtful article by Christopher Hitchens. In the face of what he is dealing with, terminal cancer, he questions the jolly epithets around death and survival. Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche is one of them.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.
From Trial of the Will, Christopher Hitchens. To be published in Vanity Fair magazine.

I’m left wondering what I would decide, should I ever have to, if faced with the sorts of choices the monk mentioned had to. Sick people, terminally ill people, people who are actually needing to make life or death decisions are not in the strongest position to make them. How free would I feel myself to be, in the face of eager medical people, to decline treatment.

Thanks to Tony for sending in the link. Much appreciated.

Birth And Death Should Not Be Avoided

Note: The Shushogi is a relatively modern distillation of the teachings of Zen Master Dogen taken from The Shobogenzo: The Eye and Treasury of the True Law. An epic!

In the Shushogi: What is Truly Meant by Training and Enlightenment, in the very first section titled Introduction: The Reason for Training is this:

The most important question for all Buddhists
Is how to understand birth and death completely
For then, should you be able to find the Buddha within birth and death,
They both vanish.

All you have to do is realise that birth and death, as such, should not be avoided

The Shushogi can be found it its entirety here on the Shasta Abbey website. I love it that what you find there is clearly a scan and I have a copy of the original beside me now.

Later on in this section of the Shushogi is this:

The understanding of the above (teaching) breaks
The chains that bind one to birth and death

Birth and death, the cyclic nature of existence is in Buddhist teaching synonymous with suffering, the first of the Four Noble Truths. Suffering exists. So here in the Shushogi is a teaching about suffering and how to bring that to an end. Don’t avoid it, look it straight in the eye. Further, and a few days ago there was a post titled Where is Home on the subject, there is the cause of suffering which has to be addressed. The Second Noble Truth, The cause of suffering is tanha (thirsting) or craving/desire.

It’s all very well to get ones head around the Buddhas teaching, to understand how it works and how it all fits together. There is for example a good article on Dependent Arising on Buddhanet which is worth reading. At the time of the Buddhas Enlightenment, which we are all celebrating at the moment December 8th being the traditional date for doing that, the Buddha taught both the Four Noble Truths and Dependent Arising. Two ways to point to the same thing, cause and effect. The law of cause and effect.

Yes, it is all very well to understand the Buddhas teaching yet something else again to put it into daily practice. I for one was utterly confused for years trying to get a grip on Buddhism. Buddhist doctrine was always there lurking in the background, in the foreground was…life and life had the loudest voice! And there was definitely no avoiding it! I sloshed between the opposites or extremes. Happy – miserable. You’re right – I’m wrong. I’m good – you BAD! I like – I don’t like. I want – I don’t want. This IS suffering.

So what breaks the chain mentioned in the above quote, or what snaps you out of the extremes? Or at least relieves the confusion. Many moments of insight come to mind. The one that comes rushing up the hill to find me is that basic from meditation instruction. Don’t hang on and don’t push away, ANYTHING. That and the discipline of refraining from labeling experience and thus habitually stamp ones personal meaning on the world. There is no need to do that.

The teaching I have pointed to in this post I hope helps a little with understanding. In Zen we are practice oriented 101%, to the point where practice disappears. By that I mean the self consciousness, the sense of practice being an add-on or something carried about, dissolves into the immediacy of responding to what’s there. Yes the sense of being a self arises during the day for all sorts of reasons (not a problem) and that sense passes, given half a chance.

Lots of tofu and veg to contemplate here!