This week's Friday photo challenge is meditation. I haven't perused the links posted to photos of such yet, but I bet that there is a rich offering of Buddhas. In that spirit, here is my offering in the genre:
Now that this is out of the way, I am left with the challenge of how to capture something as unsubstantial (though not insubstantial) as meditation. Neither the Buddha nor the quail are meditating, for both are beyond the act of probing the mysteries of the Self. If the quail is searching for dharma megha samadhi, she won't be getting it from this stony teacher. But she'll find a grain, if not of Truth, of millet and corn, scattered by us.
And yet, stony teachers, even the ones made of stone, have taught some people about stillness, or settling, if not the mind, at least the body in the most unusual circumstances. One such student is this person, for whom the fake Venice inside the bustling Venetian hotel in Las Vegas provided a platform for sharing stillness -- at least near stillness:
Just like I wonder what the Buddha would think of those imagined likenesses of him cast in stone, metal, wood, you name it, I wonder what Dante would think of this enacted alabaster likeness of him standing there inside the kaleidoscope filled with shards of Italy seen through a lens strangely. Surely he would find another circle of hell for it....
But, forget the feathered student, the stony teacher, or the madness of the fake statue in the fake piazza, for here is a photo that struck me the most as I went through my picture looking for an appropriate one for this week's challenge: the colossal chorus line of water in the middle of the desert -- the fountain at the Bellaggio:
