Some Kind of Garden: A Journey Into Zen [Kindle Edition] is now live on the Kindle store

Mysterious and enigmatic, abstract and impenetrable, the Zen gardens of Kyoto are a product of enlightened and sophisticated culture whose aim was to transcend nature by means of a man made nature.

The empty space, the surrounding landscape and the frame of mind of the viewer are all part of the design. A design that transcends representation, meaning and ideology. A powerful idea distilled to simple ingredients, the evaporation of art as we know it.

The book is a collection of photographs I took and small poems I wrote during my journey to the Zen gardens of Kyoto. I felt it is impossible to untangle their mystery with the rational instrument of reason. It is a stream of visual and versed thoughts on the joyful occasion of simply being there.

Accompanying my photographs and poems are several short verses from Basho, Ryokan and other Zen poets. Their words have sometimes been modified to fit my own frame of mind, using their verses᠆ superior ability to express my own feelings.

This book is about the frame of mind and the geometry of calm that the Zen gardens of Kyoto represent. As there are no explanations on the walls of the gardens as to the meaning of the sand patterns, so is my book void of explanations and floats on a visual lotus, like an imaginary house.

This book is a photographic essay about the Zen gardens of Kyoto, designed specifically for the Kindle and features stunning, high-resolution photographs accompanied by small poems I wrote and small verses by Zen poets. It is crafted to create a calm space of the mind, a vision of tranquility and peace.

The title derives its name from an ongoing photographic chronicles I called “some kind of" project, of which Some Kind of Garden is the first volume.

Some Kind of Garden: A Journey Into Zen by Mirena Rhee   Learn more

Bertrand Russell discusses mankind's future & philosophy.

At the 9:15 mark, the interviewer asks about the “practical use of your sort of philosophy to a man who wants to know how to conduct himself”. Also, a simple answer form Bertrand Russell on what philosophy is: Science is what we know, Philosophy is what we don't know..

The New Artist Matrix - A Cartoon

Leafing through Some Kind of Garden - A Journey into Zen

A Philosopher and KUNG FU PANDA

Slavoj Zizek on how Belief Functions Today. https://youtu.be/xCD3hg6OEQw

Grandpa passed away 29 years ago today, he was a painter, a businessman, a family man who kept extended family together

My grandparents' house was always full of guests - friends, relatives, immediate and extended family were always welcomed, fed and entertained.

My grandmother was a perfect hostess and homemaker and baked the most delicious desserts from a leafy book of secret recipes.

Here is my grandfather sporting a mustache, to the right of the little girl who is actually my aunt whom he had to take care of but couldn't find a babysitter so she ended up at the party - Union Club, Sofia 1938.

A couple of grandpa's paintings always travel with me.  Usually they are proudly displayed and occasionally hide behind clutter when  I work on the walls. Here are some pics of his Intarsia work - in my studio. Sorry grandpa, unlike you I get sloppy and not always properly hang them.

Some Kind of Project has a new face

Quote of the Day.. not really about a horse, is it?

So what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions, and was sceptical about things? Unusual behaviour for a horse, wasn't it? An unusual horse perhaps? No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well-built example of its species, it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency/ Long Dark Teatime of the Soul By Douglas Adams

To Fly or Not to Fly - The Life of Birds. Another great BBC series narrated by David Attenborough

[embed width="640" height="480"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3eqSevtuKU&list=ELaYy3a60ZYJo[/embed]

One of Goya's Black Paintings

And a Few More from Michelangelo

And although the First Sculpture on the left is not Michelangelo but a sculpture by unknown artist called Laocoön and His Sons, it is one of the finest examples of Hellenistic Baroque to which Michelangelo is a rightful heir.

The Greatest Artist that ever Lived - Virtual Tour of The Sistine Chapel

There are hundreds of to do lists of the "hundred things to do before you die" sort. I have only one item and it is the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo. A One Man Show of gigantic proportions that has been around for 500 years and still makes ordinary beings like myself weak in the head. Photography at the Chapel is not allowed and I was happy to discover The Vatican has kept up with the 21st Century and put this online. If there is one thing that is worth the price of admission and a round trip ticket so you could see it in person, this is it. Below is a link to the Vatican website that hosts the tour online.

My Book Some Kind of Garden - A Journey into Zen is up - Get Your Copy and Enter Zen Now !

It is a gorgeous Zen Book with Very Large Photographs and Very Small Poems.

I call these Zen Gardens the Geometry of Calm.

For me going to Kyoto was getting into the Zen space of the Mind. Japanese Zen Gardens have very little to do with Horticulture and a lot to do with sophisticated culture refined by the teachings and reflections of Zen Masters, whose sole focus had been to contemplate and distill reality to simple, vanishing abstractions.

Why some kind of? Some kind of is a larger body of work that started long time ago and contains Photographs, Video and Text. Some kind of is a thread that runs through all of my work and hops on various obsessions like one of those Stepping Stone Bridges in my book.

Enough said, Get Your Zen fix Now!

Featuring small poems by Shiko, Hanshan, Ryokan, Huang Po, Basho and myself.  With my poems being the smallest poems.

It all jiggles - Richard Feynman on Fire

The most important thing you will ever have

When I open a newspaper it is as if we never went through the Enlightenment. It is full of guided content and regurgitated narratives of sex, guns, and money. Have you ever wondered how many girlfriends Kant had, or Plato? Did you ever wonder how much money Van Gogh had? None.

No one ever tells you that the most important thing that you own, apart from your good health and the proper function of all your organs, is your ability to think independently. And the second thing is your ability to express and argue your opinion in public. These were the two Dreams of the Enlightenment.

In his Essay What Is Enlightenment? Kant defines Enlightenment as  "man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance." For his  second dream he says "the public use of one's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment to mankind."

Once you have traded your goods and services, obtained lodging and food, secured your home, sturdied your frame and medicated your body, feel free to use the greatest gift you may ever have, free thought.

Edge.org's annual question WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

A beautiful symphony of thought is the Answers to Edge.org's Annual Question  -  WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?  And my favorite excerpts.  

George Church Author, Regenesis; Professor, Harvard University; Director, Personal Genome Project

I am a machine that thinks, made of atoms—a perfect quantum simulation of a many-body problem—a 1029 body problem. I, robot, am dangerously capable of self-reprogramming and preventing others from cutting off my power supply. (this cracked me up - don't come near me when i  am hungry) We human machines extend our abilities via symbiosis with other machines—expanding our vision to span wavelengths beyond the mere few nanometers visible to our ancestors, out to the full electromagnetic range from picometer to megameter. We hurl 370 kg hunks of our hive past the sun at 252,792 km/hr. We extend our memory and math by a billion-fold with our silicon prostheses. Yet our bio-brains are a thousand-fold more energy efficient than our inorganic-brains at tasks where we have common ground (like facial recognition and language translation) and infinitely better for tasks of, as yet, unknown difficulty, like E. instein’s Annus Mirabilis papers, or out-of-the-box inventions impacting future centuries. As Moore’s Law heads from 20-nm transistor lithography down to 0.1 nm atomic precision and from 2D to 3D circuits, we may downplay reinventing and simulating our biomolecular-brains and switch to engineering them.

James J. O'Donnell Classical Scholar, University Professor, Georgetown University

3. Can artificial mechanisms be constructed to play the part in gathering information and making decisions that human beings now do? Sure, they already do. The ones that control the fuel injection on my car are a lot smarter than I am. I think I'd do a lousy job of that.

there is a huge difference between fighting for an idea and fighting for a nickel

Youtube cant' tell the difference but I can. I had been listening to "The Power of Myth" on my phone and when an excerpt from Martin Luther King's famous speech came on I went to youtube to look for a longer version.

Here is the most famous bit:

After the video ended I let youtube go on autopilot onto the next video. And next came an excerpt from The Pursuit of Happyness  starring Will Smith.

When at first glance these videos may have something in common - they actually cannot be any more different. One is about the power of an idea, the kind of dough humanity keeps for great holidays. And the other is the fight for the nickel, the daily grind. In the daily grind the pursuit of the stockbroker, the street sweeper are the same, the head is down and the clock is ticking.

And here is another take on pursuit, the relentless pursuit of a goal, brought to you by Arnold: