The Wonders of Bayeux – Photography

photos by Eve

 

 

Construction of Bayeux Cathedral began in the Roman period, under Bishop Hugues, to continue under William the Conqueror’s brother, Bishop Odo (11th Century). Following serious fire damage during the 12th Century, the cathedral was rebuilt in Gothic style in the 13th Century. Construction of the central tower began in the 15th Century, under Bishop Louis d’Harcourt, to be completed only in the 19th Century following major work by Eugène Flachat.

 

 

 

Excerted from an interview with Ram Dass. A Conversation with Ram Dass by David Ulrich 2017 for Parabola Magazine.

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“The soul is not part of the incarnation. It comes into the incarnation. And the soul is not afraid of death because it has done it so many times. And now the ego is individual, and the world at this moment is ruled by nations which are egos. And I find, for example, that the United Nations is very ineffective. But then what would we substitute? We could substitute wise beings from different religions or different states—philosopher kings, if you will.

If you want oneness in society, you have to teach people to go inside instead of going outside, because if they want peace, they need to find it within. I remember being at a peace rally. Everybody was yelling, “PEACE PEACE!” That isn’t peace!  Peace is inside, in me and in everybody else. If you want peace, you go down in.”

 

Sometimes a visit to a catheral like the one in Bayeux can also bring you down into the heart. The tranquility and sacred atmosphere of this beautiful interior – once the crowds have left – can be felt. It is easy to sit down and breathe deeply and find that peace in the depths of your own sacred being. We stayed for three glorious days but three days is not enough to discover all the wonderful sites in this special Normandy town. Today I offer some of my photos of the elegant cathedral in Bayeux. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This photo is provided by the Calvados Tourist Office. Photo from the crypt.

 My photo was does not have the same clarity .

 

Rumi, Thief Of Sleep And Other Poems, You Tube

 

 

“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”  Jalaluddin Rumi.

 

 

Hot of the press my new YouTube dedicated to all great Teachers of Truth. Like Rumi says, come, come, come whoever you are, come!  Life is short and there’s so much to learn about love. So Heathen, fire worshipper or idolatrous, come! (I like that. 😉 ) eve   

 

In 1976 the poet Robert Bly handed Coleman Barks a copy of Cambridge don AJ Arberry’s translation of Rumi and said, “These poems need to be released from their cages.” Barks transformed them from stiff academic language into American-style free verse.  Since then, Barks’ translations have yielded 22 volumes in 33 years, including The Essential Rumi, A Year with Rumi, Rumi: The Big Red Book and Rumi’s father’s spiritual diary, The Drowned Book, all published by HarperOne.  They have sold more than 2m copies worldwide and have been translated into 23 languages.

A new volume is due in autumn. Rumi: Soul-fury and Kindness, the Friendship of Rumi and Shams Tabriz features Barks’ new translations of Rumi’s short poems (rubai), and some work on the Notebooks of Shams Tabriz, sometimes called The Sayings of Shams Tabriz.  “Like the Sayings of Jesus (The Gospel of Thomas), they have been hidden away for centuries,” Barks notes, “not in a red urn buried in Egypt, but in the dervish communities and libraries of Turkey and Iran. Over recent years scholars have begun to organise them and translate them into English.”

800 years ahead of the times

“Just now,” Barks says, “I feel there is a strong global movement, an impulse that wants to dissolve the boundaries that religions have put up and end the sectarian violence.  It is said that people of all religions came to Rumi’s funeral in 1273. Because, they said, he deepens our faith wherever we are.  This is a powerful element in his appeal now.”

“Rumi was an experimental innovator among the Persian poets and he was a Sufi master,” says Jawid Mojaddedi, a scholar of early and medieval Sufism at Rutgers University and an award-winning Rumi translator. “This combination of mystical richness and bold adaptations of poetic forms is the key to his popularity today.”

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140414-americas-best-selling-poet

Keeping Photographs Near To Our Hearts! – Rumi

With the passing of Sathya Sai Baba, the pleasure of remembering those early days has been taken from me, because there is no longer anyone to remember with. Those ashram days are all but over for most of us that visited.  It feels like losing my  co-rememberer and like losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done, back then, were less real and important to what the day holds for us now. I began the blog with my memories of Sathya Sai Baba, taking notes from my memory and writings to post on to this blog. I eagerly waited for each visit to come around, so I could jot down more experiences and events as they unfolded in his ashram.  Mostly, I was lucky enough to have many stories to pass on to others with  like-minds and who had shared experiences. Now Sai has gone, I’ve turned  to creating YouTubes of  Rumi poems, to add to my list of hobbies. Through Rumi poems and my photography, I’m able to create Youtubes that will keep both photos and the poems I love, alive and at my reach.

This is my first You Tube this year. I hope some of you will visit and take a few minutes to watch.

Thank you. Eve

The Dark In the Light

the pool

“When the sun rises and shines,
Not all the lotus buds in the lakes and ponds bloom,
Only those that are ready, do.
The rest have to bide their time,
But all are destined to bloom,
All have to fulfill that destiny.
There is no need to despair.”

~ Sathya Sai Baba

This is the dark time before the light. The light of Spring  hovers but not quite here yet.  We are now through the month of the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the day when the North Pole is tilted farthest from the sun. Our ancient ancestors observed this event by watching the stars and the shortening days carefully  chronicling the movement of the sun. They learned that the darkest day is followed by a little more light and warmth when a new cycle of life struggles to emerge into the fullness of the new season.

When we are left to our own devices, our thinking mind tends towards a certain pessimism that all will be dark forever. The light will never return, our minds tells us; it is always darkest before it is pitch black: that is the kind of doom and gloom prediction that often dominate us most during the grimness of the winter months. A perpetual  gloom that descends and refuses to let go.  Our minds are that way. We see only the dark and the cold. Educated as we may be, we are wired to a reptile mind that wants to flee from the gloom and freeze and to return to the light and the warmth. When we imagine only the dark, nothing anyone can tell us will make it otherwise. It is not until we enter the world of fresh observations, sensations and possibilities, that there is a shift in thought. When we sit down to meditate or spend time in nature, or just taking photographs as I have done here, that we rejoin the living world.

Under the Weeping Ash Tree

Finding Our Light -Spirituality

bluebells in the glade

It is a sure thing that darkness and the light are equally sacred but that does not mean we benefit by becoming complacent about the darkness we may meet in ourselves or others. Others’ darkness is a constant reminder to ourselves that we need to overcome our own.  Yet, often we are complacent about our darkness and oftentimes, we accept it as the way things are. Why hurry? we lament.  What’s the point of life is there’s only suffering! And what does it matter if there’s a little dust on the mirror? Still, in the end we will  need to cleanse our mirror. The all important  mirror of perception will not cleanse itself, only we can purify ourselves. We must bring light into the darkness and that is no easy task. There has always been the path of consciousness and the  flow of illumination or light. The coexistence of darkness and light indeed creates a crazy dance in which the clarity of light is invited to lead, but it does not create a higher order . ~Eve

 

“He who is in the sun, and in the fire and in the heart of man is ONE
He who knows this is one with the ONE.” – Maitri Upanishad

 

bluebells in Kent, UK ~ Winter 2016

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One of the most beautiful meditations from Sathya Sai Baba.

 

“Let it be in the hours before dawn. This is preferable because the body is refreshed after sleep, and the dealings of daytime will not yet have impinged on you. Have a lamp or a candle before you with an open, steady, and straight flame. Sit in front of the candle in the lotus posture or any other comfortable sitting position. Look on the flame steadily for some time, and closing your eyes try to feel the flame inside you between your eyebrows. Let it slide down into the lotus of your heart, illuminating the path. When it enters the heart, imagine that the petals of the lotus open out by one, bathing every thought, feeling, and emotion in the light and so removing darkness from them. There is no space for darkness to hide.

 

The light of the flame becomes wider and brighter. Let it pervade your limbs. Now those limbs can never indulge in dark, suspicious, and wicked activities; they have become instruments of light and love. As the light reaches up to the tongue, falsehood vanishes from it. Let it rise up to the eyes and the ears and destroy all the dark desires that infest them and which lead you to perverse sights and childish conversation. Let your head be surcharged with light and all wicked thoughts will flee there from. Imagine that the light is in you more and more intensely. Let it shine all around you and let it spread from you in ever widening circles, taking in your loved ones, your kith and kin, your friends and companions, your enemies and rivals, strangers, all living beings, the entire world.

 

“Since the light illumines all the senses every day so deeply and so systematically, a time will soon come when you can no more relish dark and evil sights, yearn for dark and sinister tales, crave for base, harmful, deadening toxic food and drink, handle dirty demeaning things, approach places of ill-fame and injury, or frame evil designs against anyone at any time. Stay on in that thrill of witnessing the light everywhere. If you are adoring God in any form now, try to visualize that form in the all-pervasive light. For Light is God; God is Light.”

Om Shanti

 

painterly style – bluebells

Wandering Though Brittany, France – Children Of Light

 

Hybiscus from the florist shop

 

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Geraniums in the sunset

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We discover or re-discover ourselves only through our  travels and unplanned travel is the most exhilarating experience. Getting lost on the journey and refinding our path again is all part of the bigger journey called life. I truly believe that not all those who wander are lost even though we may think so. But for the ones who are lost, wandering is the only way to find themselves. So each little journey we embark upon and each adventure we take, is a smaller part of the whole – that bigger adventure that becomes us. We are our journey.    Eve

 

 

The bridge spanning Pontivvy

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pink lilly

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Rochefort en terre
the village of flowers

 

 

centre of Josselyn

 

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Pontivvy – down by the river.

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the bridge that spans the town of Pontivvy, Fr.

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Josselyn Castle – Gulf of Morbihan

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Josselin the Bridge into the Town

 

 

Josselyn, the high street

“Stop ye travellers as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I
As I am now, soon you shall be –
Prepare yourself to follow me.

Graffiti response:

To follow you
I am not content —
How do I know which way you went?”

~ Tombstone Epitaph In Tasmania Australia.

Become A Light – Children Of Light

star flower

Become A Light

Just a little request for people all over the world and children of light to please start reflecting on the stories of your souls to vibrate wisdom around the earth. You can do that with any little gift you have. Like photography or writing or painting! You need not be a big star or a public figure.  Just be yourself!   You can pick up a coloured pencil  or a microphone and begin! Press the inks of your pens onto pretty paper or tap words into your computer or iphone and start sharing what you know and have learned with all those people out there. You can do anything you want if you are focused on it.  Turn your personal story into a piece of the earth’s puzzle so that our combined  thoughts, feelings, our lessons learned and our deeply-felt convictions, reveal common truths that cannot be denied. Just imagine the changes that could happen if people everywhere, suddenly stopped acting like someone else and became true to themselves and celebrated the beauty of their  uniqueness.  It’s only after people have willingly removed their false masks and false costumes and false ideals and have begun pouring light from their hearts to reveal their vulnerability, dreams and pain, will we be able to see that beneath the surface, we are all the same, although each one unique. After all, how can the world collectively fight for truth, if soldiers in its armies are devoid of truth? We must first of all be true by putting  the ultimate truth into our words, into our  actions and into life itself. And to do so, everyone must learn to think and react with their conscience. Imagine what Truth could do to neutralise the forces of evil once this black and white world suddenly becames energized  by a  sense of amazing, unified voices. We could put back vivid colour into every home, every school, every industry, every nation, and every garden on earth where flowers have been crushed by corruption.

Eve – flowers from this summer’s collection – 2016

 

the sun-hat

 

flowers on the table

 

 

Begonia

 

Blue Geranium

 

Begonia

 

Old Widow In Her Weeds And Other Poems – Love And Friendship

from the wild garden – this month

 

Shy Marigold

Photographs from the summer garden. This year I grew my wild-flowers from seeds. They survived the driving rain and gusty winds of Springtime, the cold and dull days of early Summer now in August, they bloom and grow as if to reach the sky. So magical to behold. I have taken many photos of them all, especially the Marilgolds although I have only posted a few.  Eve

“A poor old Widow in her weeds
Sowed her garden with wild-flower seeds;
Not too shallow, and not too deep,
And down came April — drip — drip — drip.
Up shone May, like gold, and soon
Green as an arbour grew leafy June.
And now all summer she sits and sews
Where willow herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,
Teasle and pansy, meadowsweet,
Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;
Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;
Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells;
Like Oberon’s meadows her garden is
Drowsy from dawn to dusk with bees.
Weeps she never, but sometimes sighs,
And peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes;
And all she has is all she needs –
A poor Old Widow in her weeds.”  – Walter de la Mare, Peacock Pie

 

Funny Faces

 

 

Marigolds

 

LONELINESS  is the doorway to unspecified desire. In the bodily pain of aloneness
is the first step to understanding how far we are from a real
friendship, from a proper work or a long sought love. Loneliness can
be a prison, a place from which we look out at a world we cannot
inhabit; loneliness can be a bodily ache and a penance, but loneliness
fully inhabited also becomes the voice that asks and calls for that
great, unknown someone or something else we want to call our own.
Loneliness is the very state that births the courage to continue
calling, and when fully lived can undergo its own beautiful reversal,
becoming in its consummation, the far horizon that answers back.

From upcoming The Reader’s Circle essay; LONELINESS
(c) David Whyte

 

Patunia growing in a window box

 

Wild Rose – from the vase in the kitchen