Photographic Museum of Humanity...

The Vanishing of Portugal's Countryside

Behind a fable’s title, Maria Oliveira recounts the vanishing of Portugal’s countryside, where her roots unraveled and still are. 

            © Maria Oliveira, from the series Under the Surveillance of Ancient Animals

This series is not the portrait of the changes nor about the rural exodus. Rather, it’s a diary of her re-encounter with the place where she grew up. “I started this project to think about my relationship with the place where I grew up, to capture what this place means to me after years and how it has changed”, she explains.

“The title comes from a poem that I wrote. They are many wild horses around this place, and as the village is more and more empty they are coming closer to the homes. Nature is slowly conquering the place where people used to live”, she explains.

© Maria Oliveira, from the series Under the Surveillance of Ancient Animals

The silhouette of a cow appears within the fog, both majestic and quiet. Oliveira’s images are imbued with silence that we imagine reigning with these landscapes. The black and white of the photographs contribute to distill the atmosphere of a place frozen in time, uncertain, between life and death. And mystery is at every corner, on the form of a wild footprint, an aging dog looking like a wolf, the rays of the moon on nature.

“There is a mystery that this place arouses in me. When I was living there, people were telling me stories about the past. Even if I don’t think about it, it’s half way between a dream and a memory”, she explains.

© Maria Oliveira, from the series Under the Surveillance of Ancient Animals

It also gives a strong sense of uncertainty, as if the past was somehow taking over the present and not leaving much room for the future. The horizon is usually blurry, hidden by the frequent mist covering those mountains. “There is a strong feeling of emptiness that goes inside people living there, which enables them to reach a calm way to approach life. People are very strong in their way to live with only a few things and to accept the thin line between life and death.”

A symbolic photo is that of a person, seen from far away, still, in the middle of a dirt road. “This photo is really representative of what this place means to me. Someone seems stopped in the middle of something. There is nature around, and the person is lost in some ways; it’s just a small point in the middle of the nature.”

See more on Maria’s PHmuseum profile: www.phmuseum.com/mariaoliveira

Stopped to Ponder Series-Sunday morning Soul

"We all have a calling."

They call him the Wayfarer. When asked why he always feeds the pigeons, he  replied..."We all have a calling."

A living soul would seem to be a reflection of our character or those things that describe us...our IsNess.
But let us  assume that some day in the future...we will just call, future day...our souls become fully
emancipated and manifest itself as a way of totally being...

We really do not know if it will possess the character of goodness or the character of no goodness. Of course
we all think goodness, but this might give us pause to ponder the deeds of our character before it becomes a soul.

Wayfarer has a soul void of defenses and desires...the last words he spoke...
"Release all that does not serve you."

From Inside The Sane Asylum...a storm named Matthew.

Yep...Matthew headed this way. Taking my paddle and going way upstream. Will see you guys in a few days...be well...Doc.

I've never really known anyone named Matthew. Met a few, heard about some, but never got to know  their habits of thought. Not that it makes any difference. It just struck me funny that's all. "Struck me funny", now there's an old saying. A lot like the one I remember my dad saying while he and I were doing nothing one day. He looked at me and said "we're sitting here like we have good sense". Still  miss you dad! How did we get off the subject anyway. Back to Matthew. I'm getting ready to come across one named Matthew From The Sea. Just hope you will have a wee little mercy on thee.

A poem by Amar Qamar...

CRASHING waves... SMASHING seas...
Bringing sailors to their knees.
As they struggle to save their lives
Hoping and praying, help arrives.

The stormy seas as dark as coal, 
Preventing the sailors from reaching their goal.
Battered and bruised, but still they fight...
Staring ahead, into the dead of night.
Rocking and rolling as they try to stand...
Hoping against hope, that they soon reach land.

Bleary eyed from lack of sleep.
Down in their cabins, huddled like sheep.
As they're rocking and rolling down beneath
Weary sailors above, resist with gritted teeth.

hours later, as the storm starts to dissipate, 
It leaves a calm tranquil sea in it wake.
The veteran sailors know the battle is over, and they have won...
As they contemplate, other storms yet to come... 

Ole sailors like a bit of focus...
"Its simply when one has an intent on seeing life unfold in the now and evolve to meet the changes of life itself."...Doc

Let Me Tell You A Story...for Halloween

Catherine "Catillon" Repond, known as Touâscha or "The Deformed One" due to her hunchback. She was born August 18, 1663 and lived with her two sisters in the father's family home in Villarvolard.
Poor and uneducated, she remained unmarried at the age of forty.  Her notoriety arose from a series of extraordinary events.
One day, a violent storm battered Mt. Moléson, turning the sky a deep crimson from the blaze of a vast fire. All rivers, the Sarine, Albeuve and Trême were like torrents of flame. The flood soon swept away a thousand trees and twenty chalets, until finally spent against the cliffs of Pré-de-l'Essert. While the people were struggling against the fury of the elements, they suddenly beheld a gleeful Catillon dancing in a whirlwind of flaming clouds around the summit of a volcanic Moléson. She wasn't alone, but escorted by two hideous demons. The three were relentlessly trying to dislodge a gigantic boulder from the side of the mountain. Finally breaking loose, it rumbled through the pastures of Petit-Moléson, crushing the most prized cows, continuing to bound and vault until finally the hand of the Lord stopped it in its tracks forever. The Pierre-à-Catillon is still there to this day, surrounded by pines and recognizable by the figures on its sides: handprints left there by the witch and her infernal companions.

Once Catillon unleashed a tornado, and the accompanying lightning struck the steeple of the church in Avry-devant-Pont. The next morning, the church rooster was found in the parish priest's henhouse! She had supernatural powers!! Once she turned herself into a hare for a day, being chased about Mt. Gibloux by local hunters, but never in real danger of being caught.

Catillon was tried and burned as a witch on September 15, 1731 at Guintzet in Fribourg, the last victim of populist superstition...

Footnote:

Catherine Repond (18 August 1663 in Villarvolard – 15 September 1731 in Freiburg), was an alleged Swiss witch. She was one of the last people to be executed for sorcery in Switzerland prior to Anna Göldi.

In 1730, the bailiff Beat-Nicolas von Montenach, out hunting, injured a fox; the fox got away but, according to Montenach, shouted to him, with a human voice, that he had hurt it. At the same time, Catherine Repond sought refuge at a farm close to Villargiroud away from the bad weather. She was a beggar, reputed for sorcery, well known in the area, where she often performed chores at the farms. She had the same injuries which the fox had had, according to Montenach. Montenach then suspected that the fox had in fact been Repond.

Montenach had her arrested in April 1731 and taken to his castle in Corbières, where she was interrogated by torture to confess that she had flown on a broomstick to the witche's sabbath. She was then taken to Fribourg, where she was sentenced to death for witchcraft and executed by strangulation and burning.

In 1782, Anna Göldi, often called the last witch, was executed, but Göldi's trial was a dubious witch trial, while Repond was openly executed for this accusation.

It’s never been completely clear just why this one particular case navigated the Age of Enlightenment all the way to the stake — whether that was just the breaks, or if there was some larger interest at work that made Repond’s mouth worth closing.
Fribourg, in any event, adopted a 2009 resolution expressing regret for the execution, although it declined to issue a formal exoneration on the grounds that as the state itself was several times discontinuous with the one that put the “witch” to death, such a gesture would be intrinsically meaningless.

From Inside The Sane Asylum...change

Dr Ego Prozac...Underground

That's right, a name change. Now I could start spouting my opinion
 about Personal Development. But I'm not. What actually
happened...I just thought Dr. Ego Prozac's name needed something
 to distinguish it as being different. Hell I don't even know what
Underground symbolizes. In the old days, I went to a record shop
named Underground...but it was actually Underground. Went to an
underground pub once. Or maybe twice.. I remember this great
bookstore in Denver named Underground...or was it Tattered
Covers? Dr Ego Prozac'sTattered Covers.  Something to ponder
for my next change. Back to thebookstore. It was a great bookstore,
but of course that was when we had bookstores. Change...now
ain't that some shits? I hope you saw the post on Two Shits?

The act or instance of making or becoming different...now I gave this some thought. What could one do to

change and experience the act or instance of making or becoming different? Your name. Pure logic...

What else could it be. Just make or become different in an instant. Now there is a whole field of psychology 

devoted to change. They deal with behavior and break down behavior into pieces and one learns each peace at
time...or something like that. You get the picture...right? Requires waiting. It can be looked at from a philosophical level as well.
Its simply when one has an intent on seeing life unfold in the now and evolve to meet the changes of life itself.

So...I think the bigger issue for psychology is "waiting". 

Waiting entails waiting for something. And it is the something that we’re after.
 Or maybe it’s something that we’re trying to avoid. The something could be
something horrible, but waiting for something horrible to happen doesn’t make
waiting any better.The problem, or reality, is that life requires a lot of waiting.
Like a lot, a lot. Couldn't wait...I wanted instant change. So there you have it.

Dr. Ego Prozac...Underground.

Footnote: I just really wanted a reason to spout off on change...Doc

Discovering Ourselves..the most important question of your life.

If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.

A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives tUrn oUt.

Because happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect of handling the negative. You can only avoid negative experiences for so long before they come roaring back to life.

At the core of all human behavior, our needs are more or less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.Mark

MansonTHE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION OF YOUR LIFE

What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life... Mark Manson, Personal Development That Does Not Suck...check him out on Facebook and his website...always a good read with new insights on old outsights...Doc

MNovember 6, 20137 minute readby Mark Manso

From The Study...a conversation about possibilities

The Zen Of Not Giving Two Shits...

“I couldn’t give two shits” is a pretty weird expression—I mean, why anyone would want to give any number of shits toward anything is beyond me.

It’s as if some grand shit-giving presentation is the pinnacle of all meaning.

(Not giving a rats ass is another way of putting it, but I prefer the sheer perplexity of “not giving two shits.”)

People often say that the key to being happy and peaceful in life is to tear off the masks we wear and just be ourselves—in other words, to stop giving two shits about who everyone else wants us to be and just be our authentic selves.

The word “authentic” has apparently now been added to the list of buzzwords and clichés in the personal development world, which means we can no longer use it or run the risk of being forever castigated. Personally, I couldn’t give two shits about this (see what I did there?), since I actually like the word authentic. It’s in the dictionary like all the other words and I happen to feel it illustrates my point quite well.

Maybe I’ve learned to not give two shits about this stuff now, but it’s definitely not always been that way. I spent a large portion of my life giving two shits about everything. In fact, I gave more than two shits. I would go around giving as many shits as I could about every shitting aspect of life.

To put it another way, I was a serial shit giver. And it was very tiring.

I’d give shits about what every person thought of me, where I was going in life, what people thought about where I was going in life, how much money I was earning, how much I’d achieved, big life things, small everyday things and just about everything in my existence.

The weird thing was that, the whole time, I attempted to portray someone who was super laid back and didn’t give two shits about anything. I’m not sure how successful I was at that, but underneath I was desperately bothered about everything.

Shits were secretly given in all areas and directions.

What this created was an almost constant state of inner turmoil, worry, panic and anxiety about whether all this stuff I gave two shits about was actually going to work out. Regardless of what happened, I would keep on making up more stuff to give a shit about and was never able to actually sit back and just be at peace with everything.

Footnote: I wanted to share with you the humor and the talents of Michael Glover. I will present this topic over several series in the next few weeks. Each will stand on their own, but follow his story with a dash of folk psychology mixed in...hope you enjoy it. Above all I hope it made you grin...Doc

Zen and the Art of Not Giving Two shits...Michael Glover. Check out Michael's world on Facebook, pod cast and website...

Discovering Ourselves Series...Now

At Play In The Field Of Now...The Art Of Now

I've given this some thought of recent.  I always stop and read those post that highlight "the Now". Always say yep, thats good, real good...now how the hell does one do that?

We live in the age of so much distraction.  But one of life's greatest paradoxes is that your brightest future hinges on your ability to pay attention to the present. Got that? Pay attention to the present, at least  a reasonable amount of attention should be given to it.

Life unfolds in the present. But so often, we let the present slip away, allowing time to rush past unobserved and unseized, and squandering the precious seconds of our lives as we worry about the future and ruminate about what's past. "We're living in a world that contributes in a major way to mental fragmentation, disintegration, distraction, decoherence," says Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace. We're always doing something, and we allow little time to practice stillness and calm.

You are not your thoughts you know...

In her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about a friend who, whenever she sees a beautiful place, exclaims in a near panic, "It's so beautiful here! I want to come back here someday!" "It takes all my persuasive powers," writes Gilbert, "to try to convince her that she is already here."

Did I tell You About The Time...

Jess, did I tell you about the time I played bingo...?

I don't like playing Bingo in a psych ward setting. Since it's a game that involves no skill but sheer luck, and I tend not to win very often, it can be damaging to my sense of self-worth when I'm already so fragile that I'm in a psych ward, for Pete's sake. I get to thinking that not even *luck* is on my side. The staff starts cheerleading, creating a sense of competitiveness that need not exist: "Come on, men, get going, the ladies are winning too many!!" As if anything can be done to change that. The token prizes aren't worth much, the same handful of people win repeatedly, because that's the way luck is, and then staff starts imposing a pity rule: "OK, after you win four times you have to give your next prize to somebody who hasn't won yet." Hey, it may be a nothing prize, but if I didn't win it myself, I don't want it!

Still, they really like for you to participate in those things, so I agreed to be the caller. I started making jokes about the numbers I called out. "B9. As in, the tumor was not malignant, but B9." (That got a big laugh out of the nurses.) "B4. As in, stop in the naaame of looove, beee-fore you breeeeak my heaaaart...." It earned me the participation points without actually having to play the stupid game

Lemme Think About It...

"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds"

Inside The Sane Asylum...Announcement

The Sane Asylum Hysterical Society

Public Service Announcement :

When you are calling The Sane Asylum Hot Line...

If you are obsessive-compulsive, press 1 repeatedly.

If you are co-dependent, please ask someone to press 2 for you.

If you have multiple personalities, press 3, 4, 5, and 6.

If you are paranoid, we know who you are and what you want. Stay on the line so we can trace your call.

If you are delusional, press 7 and your call will be transferred to the mother ship.

If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and a small voice will tell you which number to press.

If you are a manic-depressive, it doesn't matter which number you press: no-one will answer.

If you are dyslexic, press 969696969696969.

If you have a nervous disorder, please fidget with the hash key until a representative comes on the line.

If you have short term memory loss press 9, if you have short term memory loss press 9.

If you have low self esteem, please hang up. Our operators cannot talk to you.

Thank you, this will speed up the transfer of your call...

The World As I See It...

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...The World As I See It, an essay but Albert Einstein...

Inside The Sane Asylum...

"Yep, taking a break today. No post...see you soon" ?
Thanks for dropping by. Check tomorrow, I may have something to say...or not...Doc

From The Road...The Delta Snake Review Series

...it is impossible to think of anything as nonexistent, since our thoughts are always on something that exists, has existed, or could potentially exist.

I remember reading that we all have a picture of ourselves, beneath the other trappings layered on to enhance or hide it, and hearing the argument that it was an overly simplistic idea and didn't account for the complexity of human life...those who think it's simplistic are often the ones with the narrow view.

I saw a guy rummaging through the garbage can this morning. One of the bike and backpack homeless I've seen around...didn't have any money on me, but I wouldn't have approached him anyway.

When a person is scavenging for food like that, he's not calling for help, but it's something that must be hard to do in front of people. I'm sure he knows what it looks like to others, I may not have stood aside like this a year ago, and offered to save him from such degradation with a few bucks, but now, it seems intrusive. I know the look on his face, I've seen it before, if there's food there, then it's something he got himself, past the shame reflex that would all come pouring down if interrupted in the act, like being caught with his pants down in public...I'm not sure it means that he hasn't felt that it hasn't come to begging yet, or that there's still some pride left even if a passerby would think otherwise...I won't judge him either, we all deal with homelessness differently and if he thinks scavenging is better than begging, I assume he's thought it through...

I discreetly watch and study how he operates...most people wouldn't know it but he's quite skilled and has an economy of motion that comes from practice..it looks like a successful night with the can outside of a restaurant and there's plenty of leftovers. I'm not pessimistic about my future but figure that it doesn't hurt to see how it's done...you never know, I could be like that in a few months. I've never known that level of hunger so it's a scene that gets tucked away, a mental note that this can is a good one...

St. Thomas Aquinas described the contemplation of God as the lifelong quest to understand an infinite power, that there would always be mystery and evolution of knowledge looking outwards...to see a picture of oneself isn't like having a cartoon or painting, it's the identity and from there comes outlook and experience. It's about where I've been, where I am now, and where I'm going.

His name is Al Handa...a man without a home, describing the homeless in his Delta Snake Review Blog...a homeless journal of sorts.