Marie Selby Botanical Gardens
I love the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, it has one of the most beautiful collections of rare plants and trees. It’s a most visit if you are in the west coast of Florida. The town of Sarasota is a great town if you like fine arts and great dinning.
As wonder around the beautiful site, stopping to spend time which each plant, studying it careful to know it well. I found directions to a photography exhibit and proceeded to walk there.
Wow, what a surprise, the exhibit contained some I think the greatest photographs taken by a young photographer.
I read the amazing story of this photographer who had pasted on at a young age with no family. The local camera store knew him well and decided to make this exhibition for him and donate the money to his favorite environmental groups.
What a wonderful tribute, I can only hope that my family does the same for me.
I guess I should try and find his name.
It’s a most visit if you are in the west coast of Florida. The town of Sarasota is a great town if you like fine arts and great dinning.
Spanish Moss
http://www.ramdass.org/a-tree-isnt-frightened/
Fear is the result of getting caught in the middle. Buddha says that it is the result of ignorance. And the ignorance is that when you start out as an infant with an undifferentiated awareness, and then you are taught who you are, that component, that structure which we call ego, is a very fragile structure. It seems tough, but it is actually a fragile structure. It is a structure that is created of mind, of learned neural patterns.
On one side of it, it has what Freud referred to as the Id, or the impulse life. And the structure is designed to interface between the impulse life and the society, to protect the society from the impulse life. Then on the other hand, it is this fragile structure in the face of tremendous external forces, which are parents, and then social institutions and chaos and storms and nature. All of it. So, when you didn’t have a framework – when you didn’t have somebodies, you are just part of the Universe, and there is no fear.
I mean, a tree isn’t frightened, and it is not even clear. Like, in one of the discussions that Emmanuel had about what a mouse feels like when it is being eaten by a cat. The question is, is the mouse saying, “Oh my God. I am being eaten by a cat,” or is it feeling warmth and moisture and shifts in energy? And the squealing … do we project? We anthropomorphize, and we say that it is squealing because it is afraid. But to be afraid, one has to have a self-concept. And when an organism is functioning instinctively in a scene, each change in the balance of the situation is just a new moment. It is just a new moment to which it responds. It’s very delicate to interpret things, because we tend to interpret in terms of where we are sitting. We’ve developed these structures, and if you can sense the way that works, you just see on one side of you these extremely powerful impulses in you that you are afraid of.
Please buy my prints here at Fine Art America.Fine Art America Prints of Trees art
Located at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens
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2 Comments
That tree looks like a world in itself. A complex ecosystem.
I’d have to say that a mouse feels its version of “fear” because behaviorally, their response to a mortal threat is indistinguishable from ours. And I think they have a self-concept, although of course that’s unproveable. Maybe what they lack is a temporal sense: no concept of the future, therefore no anxiety about losing it.
Jim, thank you for such an insightful comment, which made me think about the concept of fear. I used to strive for no-fear, which seem far out in today’s climate of threats.
Thanks for the food for, thought.