Tag Archives: art

My Pursuit of the Art of Living

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Tarot

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re-posted from zenhabits

by Leo Babauta

 

For many years I simply lived, and got by.

But in the last few years, after learning a bit about habits and mindfulness and simplicity and love, I have changed my approach to living.

Now I see living as an art form, to be studied and played with and practiced and mastered. Of course, few ever master the art of living, and I don’t know if I ever will. Probably not.

But I can pursue this art. I can appreciate it when others do it well. I can learn about it, through experiments and observation and introspection.

My pursuit of the art of living is only just beginning, but I thought I’d share a bit about this pursuit with you, my good friends.

Beginning the Pursuit
The journey begins with a single step, a wise man said, and for me that first step is simple:

Admit I don’t know.

Learning begins by emptying your cup, so that you can fill it with what you find. Emptying your cup means getting rid of pre-set opinions.

I don’t know what the art of living is, but I am curious.

And so the path is one of open hands, of curiosity and finding out.

And it’s one of bare feet, of being open and naked, willing to be exposed to life and chaos.

It’s about clear seeing, mindfulness turned to seeing reality as it is, without trying to make things rosy or conform to the story you tell yourself.

Clear seeing, naked, open hands, curious without knowing. That’s the path that I’ve found, so far.

The Art Emerges
With clear seeing, I start to see why I (and others) suffer, why we stress and get mad at each other and want more and more.

And now I can start to apply the art of living to my days.

Here’s what I practice with, imperfectly:

Compassion. Instead of being angry or frustrated, I find the pain in others, and open my heart to them. This includes compassion for myself.
Gratitude. Life is filled with wonder, and the people around me as well. I try to open myself to that wonder, and be grateful it’s there, instead of complaining.
Joyfear. Joy is an awesome thing to have, but joyfear is present in the powerful moments in life where joy and fear mix, where we’re taking chances and doing something outside of our comfort zone that both excites us and makes us face the possibility of failure. I now embrace these moments rather than avoiding them.
Not avoiding discomfort or uncertainty. When we avoid discomfort, we are limited by our comfort zone, and new learning and new ventures become impossible. When we avoid uncertainty, we only stick to what we know. But we can purposely become good at discomfort and uncertainty, by practicing in small bite-sized chunks, over and over.
Staying with the moment, even when it’s hard. This is the hardest of all. “Living in the moment” sounds wonderful, but actually staying with the present moment isn’t ever easy. Try it: with your eyes open, sit still and stay with the sights and sounds around you for 1 minute, without your mind wandering away from them. If you don’t notice your mind wandering, either you’re an experienced mindfulness practitioner, or you didn’t notice when your mind wandered.
Relationships are everything. Getting what we want, having things our way, having control, being right … these things matter nothing compared to relationships. Imagine being in your death bed at the age of 80 … will your sense of being right and in control comfort you when you have no good relationships, no one who has loved you? Put relationships first.
Not holding on to expectations & judgments. Expectations and judgments prevent me from enjoying what I have, from enjoying the simple presence of someone else in my life. I practice with noticing these expectations and judgments, and practice with holding them loosely, letting them go.
Letting go. This is the art of living in two words: letting go. It’s letting go of judgments, expectations, wanting to be right, wanting to control, fear of discomfort, fear of uncertainty, fear of failure, fear of boredom, comparing myself to others, wanting distraction, being irritated, complaining. It’s noticing when I’m holding these, and letting go. Loosening my heart’s grip on any of these, and letting go. And then letting go again. And again.
And so the art of living is a practice, one that doesn’t end, that doesn’t have a mastery level. It’s a constant letting go, a constant picking up again, and then letting go again. And falling, and getting up without beating myself up.

The art of living is the art of getting back up.

ArtofLife1

 

The Art of Life Tarot by Charlene Livingstone, published by U.S. Games Systems Inc; read a great review of the deck here: http://newpathstarot.com/wordpress/index.php/art-of-life-tarot-deck-review/

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Nabokov House, St. Petersburg

09 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Photography

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Vladimir Nabokov was born in this mansion on 47 Great Morskaya Street in 1899

writer Vladimir Nabokov was born in this mansion in 1899

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“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.” Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire 

 

“All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.”  Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“We are most artistically caged.”   Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Dear Jesus, do something.” Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire 

“There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.To the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time. A slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer. Propagandist, moralist, prophet—this is the rising sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts. Alas, I have known people whose purpose in reading the French and Russian novelists was to learn something about life in gay Paree or in sad Russia. Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.The three facets of the great writer—magic, story, lesson—are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought. There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like Mansfield Park does or as any rich flow of Dickensian sensual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature

 

Wikipedia article on Nabokov House

Vladimir Nabokov Lectures on Russian Literature

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From Dusk till Dawn

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Photography, Poetry

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Twilight whippoorwill
whistle on,
sweet deepener
Of dark loneliness

Silent the old town
the scent of flowers
floating
And evening bell

Temple bells die out
The fragrant blossoms remain
A perfect evening

Matsuo Bashō

 

Мorning-glories
softly floating
in the teacup

The morning mist
tangled
in the willow

Kobayashi Issa

 

 

 

The Death of the Painter

24 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in Magical Realism, Photography

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The best way to avoid boring reality of Podgorica is to spend the time on the rooftop of the building where Miro lives. The magic of the terrace surpasses by far its physical limitations – the former spreads above the offices of Omniauto, stretches across the entire Spaniard cicrcuse and reaches all the way down to the suburbs. The  monumental, metaphisical building with time adopted the qualities of the people who spend long, hot summers there. Up here, the climat is very different, it’s fresh and breezy even when down there the city is melting on over hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The terrace is capricious like Bibi, strong and determined like Miro, from Ivo she got joy de vivre, she longs for the occult after me…
We really have to watch out whom we let up here, the terrace can sometimes get cranky and downright mean if we let in someone who doesn’t belong here.  Once it swollowed the pizza delivery boy… and spitted him out at the sea-shore, thirty miles away from the city!
Some people are always here, some – only occasionaly, some visit only once…
Misses Anka, Miro’s mother, with a halo of ash-blond hair, wearing embrodiered white dress and fine leather sandals, is always here – even when she is at work; her patients at the hospital usually don’t realise that this lady is being at two places at the same time.
My close friend Bibi sometimes decides we should miss her even more than we do usually and, moving the clouds with her hips, she walks away, heading to her studio in Toloshe, which is not all that far away. She has to come back when people on Spaniard Circus are covered in plaster that fell off the terrace which mourns her absence.
Cvjetko Lainović is always here, with us. That night when he died he promissed he will stay forever here, under this whitness which he personally painted in the very night he died. Even the proverbially suspicious terrace trusts him on this one because she knows that sky above her is the whitest sky of all… At down, when the white sky is cut with little purple veins, Cvetko covers his eyes with white butterflies, this way he protects the whitness of his vision even during these momenets when the night gives birth to the day.

Copyright© 2008 Lena Ruth Stefanovic, All Rights Reserved

Cvetko Lainovic, oil on canvas

Cvetko Lainovic, nude drawings

The story is from my second book ‘Io Triumpe’ (OKF, Cetinje, 2008.) Genius Montenegrin minimalist Cvetko Lainovic, worldwide known for his “white paintings”, towards the end of his life did series of interviews with Miro Minic, the owner of the capricious roof terrace, a famed journalist and a friend of mine.

Tarot inspired short story from my second book – “Io Triumpe”

27 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by in Magical Realism

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The Wheel of Fortune

Emily Carding’s Tarot of Black Mountain

I was in love with a city, better to say I loved a city – maybe because I was born in it, maybe because it was white – who knows. I met many other cities, some bigger cities, some preattier cities, i met some more mysterious cities – but the white citi was my city. In the White city myself I was white, almost transparent.

Suddenly, my city began loosing it ’s genuine, virgin whitenes and started becoming somehow grayish.

I still loved it, equally as i loved it while it was completely white, though i noticed that myself i developed some dirty white nuances of the gray color. My nails turned into pail gray, my skin began resembling the dark grey color of the feather, which tuckled in by the southern wind stayed on the paved road that once upon a time was white, as a reminder of a big bird who turned gray and flew to the East. The whites of my eyes became dark gray and they were hardly seen, only my hair was still absolutely white. When i noticed the first gray hair in my absolutely white hair, i new that the trickster time won’t wait for me and that i should take off on the journey.

I went to the East, where long time ago sons of Abraham were heading carriyng the gifts. Unfortunately, in the East they didn’t remeber Abraham’s sons. It seemed to me sometimes that for a moment i spotted a precious part of those most valuable, long lost gifts, but usually it would turn out to be just a piece of glass that time has polished.

From the East i returned to the Black Country from where my ancestors long time ago had left for the White City. I believed the Black Country to be totally black and i was amazed when,  unexpectedly, i met there a white spot. The white spot was almost as surprised as i was, she was exhausted by the long awaiting of such a short encounter. During the darkest hour, she colored me into raven-black.

According to the memories of others at that very moment i stopped fearing because the black and white me in that moment was gone, the former-me was replaced by a virgin spot that very slowly, but unstoppably began transforming into a big white circle.

Author’s Note: in ex-Yugoslav languages –Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian – the name of my country, Crna Gora, literally means Black Mountain, while

the capital of Serbia, Beograd literally is the White City from my childhood and from this story…

Copyright © 2008  Lena Ruth Stefanovic
All Rights Reserved

Emily Carding created the magnificent Tarot of Black Mountain, which was published with the book – collection of Tarot inspired short stories “Io Triumpe” published by OKF, Cetinje 2008.

Tarot of Black MountainCopyright © 2008 EmilyCarding All Rights Reserved

image posted with permission