Life Breath of Half the World

 India

Monsoon rains have covered the entire country a month ahead of schedule,
brightening the prospects for a
bumper output of summer-sown crops such as rice, oilseeds and
cotton in one of the world’s leading producers.

Mumbai, India

India

During the year I spent following the monsoon in a dozen countries, I learned to see it as a critically important event, 
and not the disaster it had first seemed to my Western eyes.

Varanasi, India

For half the world’s people, good monsoon s  mean life and prosperity.
Bad monsoons mean famine and death.

India

Farmers experience the monsoon as an almost religious experience 
as they watch their fields come backto life after being parched for half the year. 

India

Burma

For months there is no rain, and then there is too much.
Half the world’s people survive at the whim of the monsoon.

Bangladesh 

Rain is grace;
Rain is the sky descending to the earth …
– John Updike

India

India

Only He shakes the heavens and from its treasures takes out the winds. 
He joins the waters and the clouds and produces the rain.
He does all those things. 
- Michael Servetus (1511-1553)
Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer

Nepal

Monsoon skies over Bihar, India

Anticipation
Fizzy, frothy, fickle rain
Resurrection

Indonesia

Indonesia

India

     Bangladesh

Monsoon History

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
The air is wet, soaks
into mattresses, and curls
In apparitions of smoke,
Like fat white slugs furled
Among the timber
Or silver fish tunnelling
The damp linen covers
Of schoolbooks, or walking
Quietly like centipedes,
The air walking everywhere
On its hundred feet
Is filled with the glare
Of tropical water.
Again we are taken over
By clouds and rolling darkness.
Small snails appear
Clashing their timid horns
Among the morning glory
Vines.

Monsoon Festival, India

Burma

Australia

India

Indonesia

‘Steve McCurry in monsoon flood, Gujarat, India 

Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

by Mary Oliver 

Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,
what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again
in a new way
on the earth!
…

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To Light a Fire

To learn to read is to light a fire;
every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
- Victor Hugo

Burma

    Umbria, Italy

At one magical instant  the page of a book –
that string of confused, alien ciphers–shivered into meaning. 
Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment,
whole universes opened. 
You became, irrevocably, a reader.
- Alberto Manguel

 Mandalay, Burma

Everywhere I go in the world, I see young and old,
rich and poor, reading books.
Whether readers are engaged in the sacred or the secular,
they are, for a time, transported to  another world.

  Bamiyan, Afghanistan

We are familiar with words describing images, but not so
familiar with images describing words and the
impact reading has on our lives.

Thailand

Garrett Stewart’s book, The Look of Reading:
Book, Painting, Text, explores the relationship of
reading and art.He points out that a wide array of artists from Rembrandt to  Picasso and Cassatt
and dozens more,over the past 500 years
have painted people reading and the “look of reading” on the subjects’ faces.

Switzerland

  Moscow, Russia

We read to know we are not alone.
- C.S. Lewis

India

A great book that comes from a great thinker
is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
- Pablo Neruda

  Yemen

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.
They are the destination, and the journey.
They are home.
- Anna Quindlen

India

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
– Jorge Luis Borges

Burma

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
- Emily Dickinson

Turkey

Sri Lanka

Reading is everything.
Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something,
learned something, become a better person.
Reading makes me smarter.
Reading gives me something to talk about later on…
Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
- Nora Ephron

Japan

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly,
into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Burma

Italy

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
- Joseph Addison

India

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Italy

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Lourdes, France

Morocco

Afghanistan

Stolen Childhoods

India

For the past three decades as I traveled the world on assignment I
 have witnessed children working in fields, factories, ditches, tunnels,
mines, and ship-breaking yards.

Kabul, Afghanistan

The scope of the problem is vast.
Hundreds of millions of children spend their 
childhood working and do not have an opportunity to
play, go to school, or live in a healthy environment.

India

India

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together, 
and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty,
you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.
 -  Grace Abbott

Yemen

India

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies is, 
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are
cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
– Dwight David Eisenhower

          Philippines

Afghanistan

Nepal

The object of employing children is not to train them,
but to get high profits from their work.
- Lewis Hine, 1908

Mali
Woman and her slave

Burma

There is no trust more sacred than the one the world holds with children.
There is no duty more important than ensuring that their rights are respected,
that their welfare is protected, that their lives are free from fear and want
and that they can grow up in peace.
- Kofi Annan

Mali

Niger

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets,
the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
- Anna Quindlen

Tibet

India

Burma

Kabul, Afghanistan

Nepal

The real solution is to improve the incomes of the poor and
provide their children with decent education.
- Carol Bellamy

India 

Child labour must not become the nation’s social safety net.
- Kailash Satyarthi

Bangladesh

There is no room for complacency when 215 million children are still labouring to survive and
more than half of these are exposed to the worst forms of child labour, including slavery and
involvement in armed conflict. We cannot allow the eradication of child labour
to slip down the development agenda — all countries should be striving to
achieve this target, individually and collectively.
- Juan Somavia

Afghanistan

Kandahar, Afghanistan

Just a Moment

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth
plants something in his soul.
- Thomas Merton

Jodhpur, India

This moment is your life
- Omar Khayyam

India

Know the true value of time;
snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it.
- Lord Chesterfield

Monk at Jokhang Temple, Tibet

Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days, weeks,
months, or years, but of moments.
- Sarah Breathnach

India

At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things
that could have heppened but, didn’t.
The magic moments go unrecognized, and
then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.
- Paulo Coelho

Ethiopia

Brazil

Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.
- Walt Whitman

Ethiopia

India

This moment contains all moments.
- C. S. Lewis

India

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment…
- Martin Luther King, Jr

Burma

Rejoice in the things that are present;
all else is beyond thee.
- Montaigne

Cambodia

Forever is composed of nows.
- Emily Dickinson

Tibet

Burma

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave,
find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of
opportunities and look toward another land.
There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
-  Henry David Thoreau

Thailand

Brazil

The dream was always running ahead of me.
To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
- Anais Nin

India

In a person’s lifetime there may be not more than half a dozen occasions that
he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment,
there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart.
- Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

India

Very honored to receive the award of  Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, by the Minister of French Culture.

Grief, Grind, and Glory of Work

Last month the world heard the tragic news
that more than a thousand people working at a clothing factory in Bangladesh,
were killed when the factory they were working in collapsed.

Burma

The appetite for cheap clothing in the West is insatiable.
The people making the clothing  often pay the true cost of these items.
The scale of this factory in Burma is vast.
The sense that these workers are just part of an immense machine is
accentuated by the pink shirts they are obliged to wear.

Burma

Labor disgraces no man;
unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.  
- Ulysses S. Grant

Yemen

Whether it is men fishing,  nuns washing dishes, miners digging beneath the earth, or 
working in the heat of a steel mill, work is universal, yet intensely personal. Millions work in order to survive, and for them,
there is no debate about how to achieve a life/work balance.  

Woman working in a field devastated by volcanic debris and flood waters.  Java, Indonesia

Shoe repair shop in India

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.
- Horace

Burma

India

Your life is a journey, not a rest.
You are travelling to the promised land, from the cradle to the grave.
The Sunday at Home, December 7th 1854

Candy Factory, Kabul, Afghanistan

Mumbai, India

Gujarat, India

All happiness depends on courage and work.
- Honore de Balzac

Miners search for gems.  Hindu Kush, Afghanistan

The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

MKS Steelworks, Serbia

Japan

Working for long periods under extreme stressful work conditions can lead to
sudden death, a phenomenon the Japanese call karoshi. The word in China is guolaosi.

Landi Kotal, Pakistan

Bakery run by Afghan widows, Kabul, Afghanistan

Croatia

Many find their identity in the work they do. Some enjoy intense satisfaction in their work.
For others, the line between work and play is hard to find.

India

           Mumbai, India

Sugar cane farmer, Philippines

Everything yields to diligence.
- Thomas Jefferson

Drying coffee beans, Brazil

If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or
Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.  He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of
heaven and Earth will pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.  
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Flower Seller, Dal Lake, Kashmir

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The Universal Language

 India

A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.
- William Arthur Ward

Tibet

Afghanistan 

A smile is the universal welcome.
- Max Eastman

Burma

Afghanistan

India

A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.
- Washington Irving

  An Indian tailor caught in the monsoon floodwaters in
Porbandar, India

Look back, and smile on perils past.
- Sir Walter Scott

Afghanistan

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.  
- William Shakespeare, Othello

Kashmir

Afghanistan

Cambodia

Every smile makes you a day younger.
- Chinese Proverb

Burma

Laughter is day, and sobriety is night;
a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.
– Henry Ward Beecher

China

Honduras

 Tibet

Celebration in Berlin, Germany

Peace begins with a smile.
- Mother Teresa

Afghanistan

Vietnam

The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress,
and grows brave by reflection.
– Thomas Paine

Burma

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but
sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

Afghanistan

Beauty in Imperfection

Italy

Wabi Sabi is a way of seeing the world that is at the heart of Japanese culture.
 It finds beauty and harmony in what is simple, imperfect, natural, modest, and mysterious.
- Mark Reibstein, Wabi Sabi

Tibet

Tranquil simplicity,
rustic elegance,
imperfect beauty…these are qualities that wabi sabi embraces.
Wabi Sabi:  the Art of Everyday Life,  Diane Durston

Cambodia

India

Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else.
Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment
given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view.
Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.
-  Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

Cambodia

Burma

It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay, the epiphany of Wordsworth,
the wisdom of wabi-sabi: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts.
- Paul Theroux

Iraq

Morocco

The beauty of wabi-sabi is rooted in modesty that is elegantly perceived.
The aesthetic pleasures of wabi-sabi depend on attitude and practice as much, or more, than on the materiality itself.
- Leonard Koren, op.cit.

Havana, Cuba

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
quoted in the Daily Good

Ethiopia

South Africa

The underlying principles of Wabi Sabi are diametrically opposed
to those of their Western counterparts, 
whose values are rooted in a worldview that
values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection.
- Andrew Juniper

Italy

For a lovely bowl
Let us arrange these flowers
For there is no rice
– Matsuo Bashō,  Japanese Haiku

Ethiopia

If you look closely at a tree you’ll notice it’s knots and dead branches, just like our bodies.
What we learn is that beauty and imperfection go together wonderfully.
- Matthew Fox

Nepal

Japan

Laos

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.
- John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

View of Preah Khan, Cambodia

 A diamond with a flaw is worth more than a pebble without imperfections.
- Chinese proverb

Russia

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Back to Burma

Procession of Nuns, Yangon

This is Burma, and it is unlike any land you know about.
Rudyard Kipling, Letters from the East (1898)

Fisherman on Inle Lake with the Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda in the distance

Burma is referred to  as Amarapura, the Land of Immortality, and
Yadanarbon, the Land of the Gems.
Today it is known as Suvanabhomi, the Golden Land.

Mingun Pagoda

Burma has a uniquely preserved cultured in a unparalled landscape.
Rich in natural resources and virgin landscapes,
the country has unique features which set it apart from the rest of the world.

Golden rock, Kyaiktiyo, Myanmar

 

Yangon

 

Bagan, the ancient capital, where thousands of temples, monasteries, and stupas were built.

 

Sittwe, Burma

 

Mandalay

Even the son of the foolish can be a sage ; even the son of a poor man can be rich.
Do not be contemptuous of anyone.

Yangon

 

Yangon, Burma

 

Monk reads Buddhist scriptures at monastery in Yangon

One who has knowledge is honored by others.
Strive daily to get knowledge.
- Proverb

Yangon train

 

Inle Lake

 

Monk walks through a Buddha statue workshop, Mandalay

For the temple-bells are callin’, and it’s there that I would be
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
O the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!
- Rudyard Kipling

Young Monk in Mandalay

In battle we need a warrior,
in a commotion a counselor,
during meals a loved one,
a wise man in an emergency
- Proverb

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

“Human beings the world over need freedom and security that they may be able to realize their full potential.”

Yangon

I am not thesis
I am not antithesis
I am dialectic
Just a contradiction
Patched up in palimpsest.
 - Portion of poem by Zeyar Lynn, Burma
Translated by Ko Ko Thett

Yangon

 

Yangon 

Burma is  the most religious Buddhist country if measured by the
percentage of monks in the population and proportion of income spent on religion.

Yangon

Life in Black and White

India

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and
tolerant of the weak and strong.
Someday in your life you will have been all of these.
-  George Washington Carver

Mexico City

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together.
- William Shakespeare

Afghanistan

The great use of a life is to spend for something that outlasts it.
- William James

Japan

May you live every day of your life.
- Jonathan Swift

India

 

Afghanistan

This boy has never held a book in his hands, has never attended school, and has never known
a life without the threat of violence.

Morocco

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
- Rabindranath Tagore

Afghanistan

 

Brazil

 

India

Brazil

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
- Boris Pasternak

India

 

Afghanistan

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
- Rabindranath Tagore

India

The potential possibilities of any child are the most
intriguing and stimulating in all creation.
- Ray L. Wilbur

South Africa

 

South Africa

United States

 

India

 

South Africa

 

South Africa

A the end of your life, it’s not going to matter how many breaths you took,
but how many moments took your breath away.
- Shing Xiong

The Life of Things

Vietnam

While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
- William Wordsworth,
Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

Burma

 

Italy

 

Burma

 

Italy

 

India

Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something,

or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we’re invited to read.
Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a
band of hikers will make themselves heard.

Nepal

But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails,
the solid and dependable apples,
this heap of rumpled books,
this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver.

India

These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur.

The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen.
Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over,
like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does,
as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so,
and things fall into being,
tumble through the progression of existing in time.

Burma

But the still life resides in absolute silence.
― Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

Cambodia

 

Laos

 

Italy

 

Cuba

 

Burma

 

Burma

 

India

Italy

 

Italy

Thailand

Still Life
Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car.
Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour.
Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun.
A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the post-office never blink an eye.
A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black wall map, never blink an eye.
A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his place at a window with the
serenity of a bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass whispering.
- Carl Sandburg

Kansas, United States

 

Burma

 

Cambodia

 

India

Still Life
Sublime, serene
Found arrangements
Formal compositions.
Which is which?