Transformation

Photo©2014 Istvan Kerekes posted with kind permission

Behold, I Make All Things New

(Rev. 21:3-5)

Happy Day of Transformation!

Another Kind of Christmas: Close to the Earth

Woman and Child - Refugee Camp, Gaza City © Zoriah/www.zoriah.com
Note from the Photographer: A woman holds a child in Gaza City's Beach Camp, one of the world's longest-standing refugee camps. The poverty in such areas often makes you feel as if you have taken a step back in time.

And so it was that while they were there, 
the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him
in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger;
because there was no room for them in the inn.
Luke 2: 6-7 KJV

May the God of your Soul give you peace in this Season of Brotherhood and May Angels walk with you into the New Year.

The Spirit of Christmas ~ Haiku My Heart

©2011 Thomas Hawk – The Spirit of Christmas – Alameda CA  (some rights reserved)

The Soft Glow of Lights

The Scent of Sweet Pine Branches

The Warmth of Friendship.

-Noelle Renee

Linked with Rebecca’s Blog at Recuerda mi Corazon

~~

About the Photographer

Thomas Hawk Sometimes I like to think of myself as a photography factory. I see my photographs mostly as raw material for projects that might be worked on at some point later on in life. When I'm not taking or processing the pictures I'm mostly thinking about the pictures. I'm trying to publish a library of 1,000,000 finished, processed photographs before I die. The absurdity of my obsessive compulsive view on photography is not lost on me. But it is the absurdity of life that I find most beautiful of all. Where Sisyphus had his stone I have my camera and a bag full of lenses. Most of my images are Creative Commons licensed, non commercial with attribution.  If you'd like to use any CC licensed images for non commercial or personal purposes feel free.  If you'd like to use any of my images commercially, please contact me. "Don't think about making art. Just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they're deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol

Birdwings ~Rumi

Birdwings

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror

up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

~Jalaluddin Rumi

Excerpt from an Online Essay by Margaret Lottridge July 2004

Jalaluddin Rumi (Mawlana) 1207-1273

http://www.towerpoetry.ca/talk-lottridge.html

Jalaluddin Rumi, Persia’s best known lyrical poet and mystic, was born circa September 30, 1207 A.D. in Balkh, Central Asia, in what is now modern Afghanistan. Eighteen years later his family fled from invading Mongols, settling for a time in Laranda, Central Anatolia (present-day Karaman, Turkey) where Jalaluddin married Jawhar Khatun. His father, Baha’uddin Valad, the “Sultan of the Learned," moved the family to Konya (modern Turkey) in 1228 and founded a school of Islamic philosophy and theology.

Jalaluddin Rumi became a teacher and theologian who wrote scholarly articles. His traditional education was enhanced by the guidance of his father, a mystic and theologian, and through initiation experiences with his first teacher, Sufi master Sayyid Burhanuddin Muhaqqiq of Termez (a former student of Baha’uddin). Upon his father’s demise in January of 1231, Jalaluddin Rumi inherited the school and took over the responsibilities of guiding its students.

Rumi’s theoretical knowledge of divine principles was transformed by his relationship with Shamsuddin Muhammad of Tabriz. Shams, an enlightened being, a wandering dervish with an existential initiation and teaching style, was searching for someone to receive his knowledge – “someone whose soul was as wide and deep as his own.” Rumi, with his open, questioning mind, found in Shams the perfect mirror of his own soul – his Beloved – the Friend in much of his poetry.

Rumi and Shams met on a street in Konya in the fall of 1244.
Various accounts of their first encounter illustrate that the bond between Shams and Rumi was immediate and life-changing. In one account, Shams falls to the ground in a faint at Rumi’s replies to his introductory queries. Another account has Shams throwing Rumi’s treasured books into a fountain and telling him to begin to live what he’s been reading. He says the pages will be dry, as they were, if he lifts them out. Rumi leaves them in the water and they begin the first of many mystical retreats together. This is when Rumi’s scholarly writings took on the wings of poetry….

~Margaret Lottridge 2004

Father's Day: The Gift ~ Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm

my father recited a story in a low voice.

I watched his lovely face and not the blade.

Before the story ended, he’d removed

the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,

but hear his voice still, a well

of dark water, a prayer.

And I recall his hands,

two measures of tenderness

he laid against my face,

the flames of discipline

he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon

you would have thought you saw a man

planting something in a boy’s palm,

a silver tear, a tiny flame.

Had you followed that boy

you would have arrived here,

where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down

so carefully she feels no pain.

Watch as I lift the splinter out.

I was seven when my father

took my hand like this,

and I did not hold that shard

between my fingers and think,

Metal that will bury me,

christen it Little Assassin,

Ore Going Deep for My Heart.

And I did not lift up my wound and cry,

Death visited here!

© 2012 Istvan Kerekes 

I did what a child does

when he’s given something to keep.

I kissed my father.

Li-Young Lee, “The Gift” from Rose. Copyright ©1986 by Li-Young Lee.

About Istvan Kerekes

Photographer

In His Own Words

I have been a photographer since 2007. My favourite subject is The Man. I would like to show the souls behind the faces. Everyone has feelings, everybody loves and breathes. My subjects are usually ordinary people. My main aim is to show their personalities through my images. One of William Albert Allard’s thoughts on photos and photography is just like mine, I truly believe in it: “the good portrait is about the eye, the look, since the human soul is reflected in it the most purely.”When taking photos it is my heart that leads me. After I have tuned to the subject I act instinctively.

~Istvan Kerekes

Istvan’s website: http://www.kerekesistvan.hu/

*Copyrighted images are posted with kind permission of the photographer.

Heartbeat

 

©2013 Louise Fryer ~ Heartbeat

“Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro from Vitùc on Vimeo.

Shot with iPhone and Hipstamatic App / Tinto 1848 + D-Type Plate
Italy 12.2012

Music composed by David Ianni
Prayers of Silence - Rosa Mystica I
http://davidianni.com