The founders of the Miksang Institute for Contemplative Photography bring their practice to Asia with a pioneering workshop in Japan.
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When I speak of the disappearance of boats, I do not mean pleasure yachts, nor do I mean the monoliths of modern merchant ship navigation like super tankers…. Rather, I am talking about the canoes and planked craft of indigenous watermen the world over…
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“Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?” President Obama asked himself and the world in his historic speech on May 27th, 2016. I too, ask myself why I’ve been to Hiroshima over and over, and why I took the chance to witness this historic visit by the then-sitting US president.
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I look outside again and something happens, at once strange and wonderful. I breathe, deeply, and the universe inhales with me. Suddenly, and with great force, the air expands…
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I have come as a volunteer from the United States, to live with children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic that has raged in Cambodia since the 1990s…
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My grandmother compiled a cookbook, written out in a foolscap quarto notebook in her small, neat hand. It had recipes for everything from aloo dhum potato curry to hot ale punch to American fudge, and included meal plans and guest lists…
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Tabasco sauce? Great topping for ice cream. Jalapeños? Mild, mouth-refreshing chewing gum… I’d graduated, man. Nothing could touch me now…
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Manshin is a title of respect identifying a mudang, a female Korean shaman. For centuries manshin had been openly persecuted, their practices disrupted and shrines destroyed, their artistry desecrated to entertainment…
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Kim Keumhwa, Korea’s renowned charismatic naramansin, “national” shaman, is already awake…preparing to greet the spirits lodged in her small sindang (spirits’ shrine room) next to her bedroom.
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My friends and I fled the approaching wave in a mad scramble up a dense jungle hill, and during the hours that followed it seemed that the world as we knew it had ended.
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“Let the photo-taking sessions be a ballet instead of a military-style attack or a grueling marathon. In the garden, drink the sun, sweep with the wind, sing like a bird, and dance with a shovel and a rake.”
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Like other artists and activists before her who have unequivocally opposed nuclear technology in all its forms, Kamanaka Hitomi doesn’t regard her own ideology as a matter of present-day left and right.
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“Would we be able to decrease the incidence of dangerous generalizations, based solely on one’s background, if there were a place where children around the world could meet and get to know each other? How could we make that possible?”
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With the human race as a whole increasingly threatened by global climate change, overpopulation and food scarcity, our very survival depends on our ability to overcome history-based animosities…
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Wistaria was the first intellectual style teahouse, and created a quiet, clean place to focus on drinking tea. Outside the wood and paper walls of the two-story Japanese house was a garden with bamboo and a koi pond.
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For the Chinese understand that without nature, man is inherently insignificant. It is therefore understandable that of all of the thousands of teas in China, none were specifically named after a person, not even after any of the many emperors who were often responsible for naming them.
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by Lauren W. Deutsch
How does one casually “visit” such an area as a tourist? Should I be afraid of potential for armed attack? Is there a protocol of safe, reverential behavior? Isn’t it more a place of pilgrimage? I had 50 kilometers in Seoul traffic to think about it.
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Karen Ma is the author of the recently published Excess Baggage, a novel about the lives of a Chinese immigrant family in Japan.
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Will this catastrophe in Japan change us and lead to a more innovative, caring and interconnected way of living? Will the outbreaks of altruism and civic enthusiasm propel us to take similar steps? Will we demand ingenious forms of accountability?
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In front of us stood a statue of Buddha, about three meters high, surrounded by swirling painted blues and reds and browns — flanked by two smaller statues of guardians. The light from the open doorway fell on the Buddha and suffused throughout the space.
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“There’s so much to learn from birds. When I was a child they were my first absorbing fascination in life.”
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