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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To Be Human

Conversations are at the heart of what it means to be human.
- Theodore Zeldin

Rajasthan, India
A boy listens as the elders talk at a traditional wedding festival.

India

The character of a man is known from his conversations.
Menander (342 BCE – 292 BCE)

Tibet

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
- Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection

 Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves
than in drawing it out of others.
- Jean De La Bruyere

 California, USA

Lebanon 

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man’s observation,
not overturning it.
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Yemen

Druze Elders, Lebanon

Golden Temple, Amritsar, India

Angkor Wat temple complex, Cambodia

When you have spoken the word, it reigns over you.
When it is unspoken you reign over it.
- Arab Proverb

Lourdes, France

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

Brazil

Kashmir

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Kabul, Afghanistan

France

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing
at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
- Dorothy Nevill

Russia

Thailand

Bursa, Turkey

A single conversation with a wise man is
better than ten years mere study of books.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Dublin, Ireland

Maimana, Afghanistan

Steve McCurry, Afghanistan

For information about Steve’s photographic expedition to Burma, please visit our website.
http://stevemccurry.com/expeditions/myanmar-expedition

Finding the Sublime

 Rajasthan, India

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
T.S. Eliot

Yamdrok Tso Lake, Lhasa, Tibet

What are the scenes of nature that elevate the mind
and produce the sublime sensation?
…the hoary mountain, the solitary lake,
the aged forest and torrent falling over rocks.
– Hugh Blair, lecture notes from 1783.

Dal Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir

Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless,
so that the mind in the presence of the sublime,
attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the
failure but pleasure in contemplating the
immensity of the attempt.
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

 Myanmar/Burma

Myanmar/Burma

Bayon, Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Lives of great people all remind us, we can make our lives sublime,
and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Japan

Preah Khan Temple, Angkor Wat, Camboida

Inle Lake, Myanmar/Burma

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Agra, India

Kathmandu, Nepal

Rajasthan, India

Thrissur Pooram, Kerala, India

Weligama, Sri Lanka

Brazil

Greatly begin.
Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime.
Not failure, but low aim is crime.
-James Russell Lowell

Gujarat, India

Afghanistan

Road to Sarobi, Afghanistan

Maimana, Afghanistan

Tibet

 Cambodia

Rajasthan, India

Four sublime states of mind  taught by the Buddha:
 Loving-kindness
Compassion
Sympathetic Joy
Equanimity

Sri Lanka

Taj Mahal, Agra, India
Built with translucent white marble and inlaid with gems from China, Tibet, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and the Arabian peninsula

The Taj Mahal in Agra, India, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain,
are two of the world’s most iconic buildings.
They both evoke passionate emotions, even love, despite being
on opposite ends of the historical and architectural spectrum.

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain
Constructed with a steel frame covered with titanium sheathing

In both buildings shape, size, scale, proportion, texture, color,
and light work together to sublime effect.

Basel, Switzerland

 

To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
- William Wordsworth