small change

what has been lost is safe

This week's Photo Friday challenge is “from my past.” And this is my response to the challenge:

Apparently, these stuffed animals, blind and bald, were things that once meant a great deal to me in a past so distant to me now as to be the stuff of legends. My mother went through her locker in the basement of her apartment building in Budapest to retrieve this dynamic duo when I was there this last September. She thought I might want to claim them and take them home with me, now that my own children have grown up and beyond the need for transitional objects of this kind.

I left these two there, but took this photo of them. As it is, there is no room for them on my desk, where there is another stuffed bear, that of my older son's, holding a silent vigil over an unshareable past.

vehicle

This week's Photo Friday challenge is “vehicle.” And this is my response to it:

(click to enlarge to read ad copy on tram)

When I was last in Budapest, just this last September, I ended up taking lots of photos of trams, cars, underpasses, platforms, bridge sidewalks, all things of transit and transitions, I suppose. Budapest was never my home, since I lived there less than two years of a fairly long life now, so it is apt that the elements that most appealed to my photographer's eyes in that city had to do with motion.

A vehicle is a means of transport. It is supposed to get you from here to there, whether in body, mind, or spirit. You take at as it comes, then leave it. You board a plane, you do your Spanish verb drills, you sit to meditate. It is supposed to be practical, right? But the vehicle becomes something else than mere means of transport if you happened to have spent too much time “in transit.”You get stuck. You may even get agoraphobia, or you may well become peripatetic.

Part of me, I suppose, is still on that tram in Budapest, waiting to be flown, for my smile, to New York. Which means that I am going nowhere on the tracks laid over cobblestones in Budapest, even as I keep moving, in my mind, to a New York that can never be arrived at, let alone be mapped.

three

This week's Photo Friday challenge is “three.” And this is my response to the challenge:

Budapest, Hungary - September 2009 (click on photo for larger version)

I took this picture on the last day of my recent visit to Budapest, Hungary. The reflections  of people waiting for the tram from across the empty seats reminds me of the sense of ghostliness I had during this last visit. It's not just that more and more Hungarian words are receding into the shadows cast by the growing years since I last spoke it fluently, but also, I myself felt like a ghost in a city that was never truly my home.

softness

This week's Photo Friday challenge is “soft.” And this is my response to the challenge:

Cats may be blessed with those proverbial nine lives, but a few lucky stuffed animals bless lives when they are passed from generation to generation. All along they toil hard to smooth the edges for their humans that move between the stages of their lives. If they have done their work well, these transitional objects will outlive their purpose. And in the process of such work they lose their plush exterior, even as they soften the hearts of those who once had held on to them with such ferocious needs.

well-groomed

My on-time entry for this week's Photo Friday challenge:

 

For a mostly vegetarian (which I am), the display of dressed meat is like a glimpse into the fringes of pornography. But hey, at the heart of it, when you think abut it, is nothing more than a muscle.

autumn

My belated entry for last week's Photo Friday challenge: Autumn

The signs of autumn in the parts of California I call home are rarely the riot of colors typical of climates with delineated seasons. If anything, the dominant color I associate with autumn around here is fresh, pristine green. That's because when the weather finally cools and the first rains have come down like an ancient memory the grass emerges with new shoots above the carpet of tinder-tinted gold that has been the ground for the dance of wind and fog all summer long.

photo friday - the face

Friday rolled around rather fast this week, so here is my contribution to Photo Friday's challenge for this week, which happens to be the face:

This shot is a crop of a photo I took in Szentendre, Hungary, and which I featured in this previous post. When I first raised my camera to capture the horse, which caught my attention, the driver of the cart, perhaps somewhat superstitious, pointed quickly to the horse and then turned away, almost fully, so that he wouldn't be in the frame. Little did he know that he was never to be in the frame, since his posturing for the tourists paled beside the horse's utter weariness and broken spirit, which, at least, was shielded partially by the blinders that kept him trapped within his own narrow field of vision.

photo friday - plants

Photo Friday weekly challenge: Plants

photo friday: iconic

This week's Friday photo challenge was iconic. I was truly at a loss for a photo for this one, since I kept thinking in the traditional sense of the term, in religious terms, which had me looking for those venerable images of gods and goddesses. But deification, done as it is by people, is inclusive of more than just people. Its objects can be as grand as the dizzying statues of gods and dead kings, or they can be objects, when the religion is more a matter of personal choice, as is the case with those from whom the old saw about the body being a temple becomes literal. For these worshipers, a pair of shoes is iconic of their aspirations, and they can become the set of hands clasped in prayer, or the chalice, which they fill with feet of clay, while they wait for the wings promised by Nike (not the goddess, mind you, but the manufacturer of such rubber dreams):

meditation: friday photo challenge

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: