LIFE AS MYTH
JOURNAL
JOURNAL 2024
Of wonder
WINTER 2024
All the truth
LIFEWORKS
ATLAS
WINTER 2024
FOLLOWING THE LIGHT
Picture Five: Taming the ox. Ten Oxherding Pictures. Attributed to Shubun (n.d.) Japan, Muromachi period. Handscroll, ink and light colors on paper. 9/8/2013
Head of Bodhisattva. Limestone. Northern Qi Dynasty. 550-77. Sackler Gallery. [Sanskrit bodhisattvah, one who has attained perfect knowledge or enlightenment, from bodhih, perfect knowledge + sattvam, essence, being].
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart . . . Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
C. G. Jung [1875-1961], Swiss psychiatristNew York is full of places that restore the spirit. For instance, the parks are quite beautiful here. Riverside and Central Parks are the best known and the most sprawling. But there are smaller parks throughout the city, beautiful green gems that break the city rhythm with the comfort of a park bench, the chatter of a fountain, the unexpected intrusion of grass and trees.
Nature is a great healer and she has many temples. But art is a great healer as well and in a city full of museum-temples, the Sackler Gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a personal favorite.
My first visit in October 2003 is not particularly vivid in my mind. The museum is so immense and its treasures so rich that only a few individual pieces secured a place in my memory. Perseus with the head of Medusa. A bronze Florentine mermaid. Shiva dancing in the ring of fire at the far end of a darkened gallery. But somewhere in my cluttered remembering there was also a place for one specific gallery, the Sackler Gallery, a vast open room with veils of white light and a massive weathered painting.
Life as Myth, Collected writings, Usher. (2006 - ). Adapted from a 2013 essay.
