Category Archives: Falls Between the Cracks

Falls Between the Cracks, photograph, Teachings

Free To Move

December 21, 2012 Mugo 5 Comments

Alone together. Sheep in The Lake District.

Now visiting family my eye once again rested on Susan Sontag’s classic, On Photography published in 1977. This time I picked it off the shelf. It makes for interesting reading especially since so much has changed since her intelligent pondering on the photograph and photographers. Digital photography being one major change. This book alone had a huge influence on my decision not to continue on with my life-passion of photography, full time. There is much I would wish to quote from Sontag’s book. For now here is something from the end of the book quoting historic photographer, Paul Strand.

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzsche meant when he said, “I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.” He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own vision. Paul Strand

I guess we all know how we become coloured by those around us. Moods are strangely catching as are thought patterns. Where ones attention is directed will influence, not only others attention field, it will influence their whole person including their felt sense of themselves. That might include feeling dragged down, lifted up, unconnected, floating etc. This is normal enough and I believe we have an inbuilt sense as meditators/conscious beings to return to ourselves and to move on. We would talk of this as bringing meditation into daily life circumstances, to keep on returning to ones sitting place.

Yes, Susan Sontag and her profound reflections on photography influenced me way back and I am glad of that. We can and do benefit from the insights and hard graft of others and being open to influence is crucial. However, and almost simultaneously, we have to personally put in the hard graft of moving on past our teachers and mentors, parents or guardians, friends and partners who have helped shape us. Crucially, without judgment or rejection.

I guess that simple ol’ instruction to bring meditation into daily life, to constantly forget, and move and breathe ones uniqueness is not so simple. Not easy either, yet essential to going deeper. Spiritually speaking.

Falls Between the Cracks, Information, Out and About

BAD – Buddhist Action Day

February 28, 2012 Mugo 1 Comment

Well I am always glad to get behind collective activity which lends itself to the good and BAD err….sound good! Sorry I couldn’t resist! So if you are part of a Buddhist group or community why not clean out a ditch, mend a footpath or…well there are so many possibilities. Linking up with groups such as The Woodland Trust, National Trust and similar organizations might provide suitable work for willing hands.

Would you or your organisation (in Britain) be willing to run an event during the Diamond Jubilee year in July 2012? Each major faith community has been offered a month in 2012 in which to organise inclusive events based on various themes. The Buddhist community has been offered a month – July – in which to run events that have an environmental theme. We have chosen July 3rd as our official ‘Earthkind – Buddhist Action Day’ but your events may be planned for any time during July.
Earthkind – Buddhist Action Day. The Network of Buddhist Organisations.

Please let me know if you/your Buddhist community are organising something during July. I’d love to join in if I’m nearby(ish), already I’m thinking of heading towards Telford in the Midlands.

And do remember to let the NBO know what you have planned so they can publicise it on their website.

Falls Between the Cracks

A Driven Photographer – Discovered

January 22, 2011 Mugo Leave a comment

I was completely taken up by this story. And even more taken up by the documentary photographs Vivian Maier took on the streets of Chicago using black and white film. The format is two and a quarter inches square using a twin-lens reflex camera.

The story of Vivian Maier is so incredible that the man who discovered her says: “If you made this up for Hollywood it would be like, ‘Oh, come on, that’s too hard to believe.’ She is,” he adds, “the most riveting person I have ever encountered.

Following links on this story I see that there is a documentary film being made about Ms. Maier as well as a book of her photographs. But what really interested me was a comment made about her in an interview. Along with all the great qualities about her photographs she was complemented on being a really driven photographer. And she certainly was. Her days off were spent taking photographs. There are years worth of images which nobody saw, except her. There were boxes of undeveloped films. Images even she hadn’t seen.

Driven? It wasn’t fame or fortune that had her taking pictures. It wasn’t necessarily that she was interested in the photographs as photographs to display – the undeveloped rolls speaks of that. (Well maybe she ran out of money, who knows.) Putting myself in her position, and in fact I was in a similar position in my teens as a nanny taking pictures on my days off, I think she just delighted in seeing. Of catch that moment. That seems to be IT. She was taken up with the act of picture taking.

What I know of documentary photography I see a cracking good collection. Almost every image matches or surpasses those of the great documentary photographers. Feast your eyes.

Excitement over. Back to my little point and shoot digital wonder.

Hat tip to Iain from Little House in The Paddy for putting me onto this story. He talks about Square Images in his post on this collection of photographs. I notice the angle of view the pictures are taken from. With a twin lens reflex the camera is held around waist height and one composes the picture looking down on a ground glass screen. I feel there is more of an intimate connection between camera and subject as a result.

(Note: the twin-lens can be used at eye level but I rarely used it that way.)

Falls Between the Cracks, Information, This and That

Social Networking On Line

October 19, 2010 Mugo 2 Comments

Well, this article is certainly an eye opener and a half.

How is a group its own worst enemy?

So, Part One. The best explanation I have found for the ways in which this pattern establishes itself, the group is its own worst enemy, comes from a book by W.R. Bion called “Experiences in Groups,” written in the middle of the last century.

Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.

There was no overt communication or coordination. But he could see that whenever he would try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it. And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?

He could never resolve the question, and so he decided that the unresolvability of the question was the answer. To the question: Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: “Hopelessly committed to both.”

From a talk given in 2003 by Clay Shinky A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

All good stuff to be aware of for those working towards building community on-line.

Falls Between the Cracks

A Proclamation – Not For Cats

September 7, 2010 Mugo 4 Comments

This is in memory of Chester who died nearly two years ago. He was a lovely dog and apparently he could sing! This video is for your dog, or children but most definitely not for you cat(s).

Chester ‘Singing’ from Mugo on Vimeo.

There is nothing like a dog howling. I loved to howl along with our dog as a child. He would sit at the door wanting to go out and we would sit there together. Howling. Yes, I did encouraging him but it didn’t take much to get him going. There is something to penetrating sound and we use it in Buddhism. I’m thinking of the Conch shell used during the last ceremony of Jukai. The Ceremony of Recognition.

It is said that the sound of the Conch penetrates the far reaches of the Universe. It is an exclamation, an exaltation. To sound a proclamation that these people have received the Precepts and become Buddha. Dear Chester is proclaiming however I’m not sure what exactly. Hope you and your dog(s) enjoy the video.

On the theme of sounds. A monastic friend announced his new word as we ate our lunch together today. Xylophonically, to speak xylophonically means to sound like rattling wood. (Xylo apparently means wood.) Rather like how one might sound sporting wooden teeth! However the definition can be expanded but I’m not going there….

There must be a word that describes the sound of the Conch, and dogs singing. Xylophonic I think not!

Many tributes to Chester were attached as comments to the Post Animal Rescue- Animal Friends.

Jade Mountains Buddha Hall