Tag: People
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Mirror images
Apart from confronting us with ourselves, a mirror can reflect objects from a part of the room or space around us that would otherwise not be visible from our point of view. Or it can reflect a side of an object that we would not be able to see without mirror. In the picture of…
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The time path
At the beginning of this millennium the Swiss city of Neuchâtel laid out a path through time in the nearby woods – Le Sentier du Temps. Its starting point was meant to mark the origin of our planet Earth and the end point our present time. Each step of one meter was equal to one…
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Landscape with horseman
As we noted in last week’s post, a picture of a beautiful landscape normally doesn’t create the emotion that the viewer experienced when he looked at it in reality and which caused him decide to take the picture. What is it then that makes a photo of a landscape potentially interesting? I don’t know if…
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New life, new hope
What does the boy in the picture see, what does he feel, what associations does he have while looking at the woman-statue? His apparent intensive look and the way he holds the woman by the arm, suggests she makes him think of his mother or another close family member. He seems particularly intrigued by her…
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Cambodia, and the trauma of a nation
With the defeat of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in 1979, the survivors of four years of terror could slowly start picking up the bits and pieces of what was left of their lives. With a quarter of the population dead, almost every family had lost several of its loved ones.…
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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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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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Respect
Respect is an important aspect of Japanese culture. The emperor, ancient traditions, monuments, art, craftsmanship, they all deserve our deepest respect. As does the Japanese garden; this artistic creation of a highly idealized natural environment …. let’s call it paradise. A paradise that has never existed in real nature – the opposite of the garden…
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Teashop happiness
A mother and daughter in their teashop in the mountains around Pokhara. The scene breathes unpretentious simplicity and natural ease. The amused face of the girl makes us smile too. We participate in a moment of contagious joy. How beautiful life can be! Photo of the week: Pokhara, Nepal, 1996
καιρός remembered 