29 August 2011

That's what this storm's all about ...

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. 

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and youwill bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. 

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about." 

 Haruki Murakami 




storm rain woman solitude pictures, backgrounds and images

28 August 2011

Life is never as long as we want it to be ...

"People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were travelling abroad."

Marcel Proust

You are now another star ... one of the stars that smile at me in the dark ... 
God moves in mysterious ways  ... 



Apocalyptica - Farewell

25 August 2011

East of the sun, west of the moon ...

"Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Loneliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. "

Janet Fitch


A-ha - East of the sun, west of the moon


24 August 2011

Life lingers ...

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine." 


 Milan Kundera

Treasures by Marian Huxley Collier

23 August 2011

The Tambourine Girl by John William Godward

"I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then. "

Lewis Carroll


22 August 2011

Facing my own soul ...

"The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.


Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it - made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand." 


C.S. Lewis 


20 August 2011

Today I got my miracle ...

"There are all sorts of experiences we can't really put a name to...The birth of a child, for one. Or the death of a parent. Falling in love. Words are like nets--we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, grief, or wonder. Finding God is like that, too. If it's happened to you, you know what it feels like. But try to describe it to someone else--and language only takes you so far." 

 Jodi Picoult 


Thank you God for bringing her back ... where there is life, there is hope ... 

19 August 2011

The truth about forever ...

"In life we all have an unspeakable secret, and irreversible regret, an unreachable dream, and an unforgettable love." 

 Diego Marchi


The Perennial Sophia -Therion

18 August 2011

The Unbearable Lightness of Being ...

"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."

Milan Kundera


It seems like I am condemned to live with this feeling ... as an observer I keep this pain stuck on my throat,  inside of me ... my heart cries ... cries just to remind me how powerless I am ... 

16 August 2011

Dúlamán by Clannad

"There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore." 

Laurie Halse Anderson


15 August 2011

The Skat Players by Otto Dix

About Dix

Otto Dix was born in Untermhaus, Germany. The eldest son of Franz and Louise Dix, an iron foundry worker and a seamstress who had written poetry in her youth, he was exposed to art from an early age. The hours he spent in the studio of his cousin, Fritz Amann, who was a painter, were decisive in forming young Otto's ambition to be an artist. Between 1906 and 1910, he served an apprenticeship with painter Carl Senff, and began painting his first landscapes.

When the First World War erupted, Dix enthusiastically volunteered for the German Army. He was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In the fall of 1915 he was assigned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit in the Western front and took part in the Battle of the Somme. In November 1917, his unit was transferred to the Eastern front until the end of hostilities with Russia, and in February 1918 he was stationed in Flanders. Back in the western front, he fought in the German Spring offensive.  In August of that year he was wounded in the neck, and shortly after he took pilot training lessons. He was discharged of service in December 1918.

Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war, and would later describe a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through destroyed houses. He represented his traumatic experiences in many subsequent works, The Skat Players (Card Playing War Invalids) is one of them. 


This is a very intriguing piece, it reflects the reality of war, the cripples were everywhere on the streets dragging themselves  around, living their painful lives. 

The details of the painting

 
Dix depicts the wounded and deformed heads of the soldiers. 


The soldier is holding the cards with his foot, he has no arms. The tube coming out of his ear is a listening device initially created for sailors to hear one another at the sea, but it was soon adopted for hearing impaired.


The mechanical jaw says "only genuine with the picture of the inventor" next to it there is a self portrait of Dix. 


The table legs and the prosthetic limbs tangle in a indistinguishable mess. 

"All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal." 
John Steinbeck

14 August 2011

Brief Lives ...

"I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend..." 

Neil Gaiman (The Sandman) 



12 August 2011

Kali Yuga


Kali

Hinduism

One Kalpa, a day in the Mind of God, is made up of four cycles (aka yugas) and/or ages known as the:

The Age of Wisdom/ Satya or Krita Yuga
The Age of Ritual/Treta Yuga
The Age of Doubt/ Dvapara Yuga
The Age of Conflict/ Kali Yuga


The Age of Kali for the Hindu is the natural ending of the world in the fourth age . It is one of a series of changes, each of which marks the end of one cycle and the beginning of another creation. The central figure in the story is Vishnu, the preserver God, into whose self the world is absorbed before being born again. According to the Hinduism beliefs, Vishnu has already saved humanity on a number of occasions, symbolically appearing as a savior in many different forms. Vishnu incarnates in ten avatars, of which there have been nine, the last three have been: Rama,  Khishna and Buddha. It is said that he will appear again , as Kalki 'the avenger', riding a white horse , destined to destroy the present world, the corrupt age of the goddess Kali,  and to take humanity to a different, higher plane, the golden age of Krita.

Vishnu

11 August 2011

The hero or the villain ...

"Keep in mind, that no one thinks himself a villain, and few make decisions they think are wrong. A person may dislike his choice, but he will stand by it because, even in the worst circumstances, he believes that it was the best option available to him at the time." 

Christopher Paolini


Cafe del Mar - Mandalay (Beautiful)

10 August 2011

Flora by John William Waterhouse

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten ...





09 August 2011

Son Of The Staves of Time by Therion

"Oh how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening."

 Herman Hesse 

08 August 2011

Sleep by Frederick Carl Frieseke


"All I know is that while I am asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I have ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse."
 
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quijote de la Mancha)


07 August 2011

Still Another Day verse XVII by Pablo Neruda

The days aren't discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.
They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones.


The Antique Juggling Girl by Lord Frederick Leighton

06 August 2011

...

"I'm not like them, but I can pretend... " 

Nirvana


04 August 2011

All I need is a miracle ...

"So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green." 


Augusten Burroughs




03 August 2011

Dead Can Dance - Sanvean

“You can shed tears that she is gone,
or you can smile because she has lived.
You can close your eyes and pray that she'll come back,
or you can open your eyes and see all she's left.
Your heart can be empty because you can't see her,
or you can be full of the love you shared.
You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday,
or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.
You can remember her only that she is gone,
or you can cherish her memory and let it live on.
You can cry and close your mind,
be empty and turn your back.
Or you can do what she'd want:
smile, open your eyes, love and go on.”
David Harkins


02 August 2011

Powerless ...

"When you lose someone, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all nerves are still a little raw."

 Jodi Picoult




01 August 2011

The Darkest Evening of the Year ...

"Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one." 

Dean Koontz 


Portrait of a young girl by Ivan Gorokhov