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Mama, look!
A tree, a plant, so immense, how can that be! The amazement starts when coming near to the base of a giant sequoia and trying to imagine the size of its circumference. Next, looking up along its trunk and seeing no end to it: the top must be somewhere high up there, scraping the sky.…
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Living monuments
Americans are used to having things big: skyscraper buildings; paper mugs for coke or weak coffee in sizes big, bigger, biggest; and trees in dimensions that are unparalleled in the world. When we are walking in the midst of giant sequoia trees we suddenly feel tiny and humble. But it is not only the sheer…
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Death anonymous
A graphic photo of intersecting lines on a white background. Plain and severe. What more can we say about it? We are on a small, snow-clad cemetery in the mountains. The wooden cross is of utmost simplicity. The two beams haven’t even been placed in one plane. The cross beam has simply been fixed on…
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White on white
The bathtub in the snow reveals that we are here on a mountain pasture in winter. The cows are in their shed down in the valley. The marmots are hibernating in their holes underground. And the people have closed their summer chalets and have moved to their homes lower down. The virgin blanket of snow…
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The lonely slipper
or Shiva and Parvati in a courtyard “Shiva is man and Parvati is woman; they are the causes of creation. All men have Shiva as their soul, and all women are Parvati. Shiva has the form of the male sign, the lingam, and the goddess has the form of the female sign, the yoni. The…
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Floating Baobab
The decisive moment for this picture came only after it was taken. It occurred to me that it could be interesting to turn the photo 90° anti-clockwise, and that’s what you see here. It suddenly becomes intriguing: it looks as if the tree is floating on a perfectly still water surface, creating a crystal clear…
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The Pachinko temple
During my walks through different neighbourhoods of Kyoto, going from one beautiful temple, garden, or palace to another, I now and then passed buildings like the one in the photo and I’d wonder what kind of place this was and what went on inside. One afternoon I decided to enter a Pachinko parlour as I had…
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The art of tea
Looking at the photos in each of the last four posts, I highlighted a concept that is central to Zen or – in broader terms – to traditional Japanese culture. With the photo of the display in the Tokonoma I brought the word ‘harmony’ into focus, but ‘respect’, ‘purity’, or ‘tranquillity’ would not have been…
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Tranquillity
Zen rock gardens are oases of tranquillity. They are not intended as places we set foot in, but places we quietly contemplate from the outside. They are places for meditation, created in the precincts of Zen Buddhist temples. Ryoan-ji, the rock garden in the picture, dates from the end of the 15th century. With its…
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Purity
“The path is no more than a way out of this floating world – Why not wash off upon entering it the dust of impurity from our heart.” Stone wash basins like the one in the picture, containing crystal clear water, are invariably placed near the entrance of a Japanese tea room. Before participating in…
καιρός remembered
… the right moment, position chosen, shoot …
καιρός remembered 