Josse Ford :: Art Journeys and Conversation ::

Math Professor Wins a Coveted Religion Award - New York Times

Math Professor Wins a Coveted Religion Award - New York Times:

Continuing a recent trend in which the world's richest religion prize has gone to scientists, John D. Barrow, a British cosmologist whose work has explored the relationship between life and the laws of physics, was named the winner yesterday of the 2006 Templeton Prize for progress or research in spiritual matters.

Dr. Barrow will receive the $1.4 million prize during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 3. The prize was created in 1972 by the philanthropist Sir John Marks Templeton, who specified that its monetary value always exceed that of the Nobel Prize. Five of the last six winners have been scientists. Asked about this, Dr. Barrow said, "Maybe they ask the most interesting questions."

"The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford Paperbacks)" (John D. Barrow, Frank J. Tipler, John A. Wheeler)

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A Call To All Artists

Here's a call to action from Nietzsche:

"We, the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand, we firstlings of a yet untried future - we require for a new end also a new means, namely, a new healthiness, stronger, sharper, tougher, bolder, and merrier than any healthiness hitherto. He whose soul longs to experience the whole range of hitherto recognized values and desirabilities, and to circumnavigate all the coasts of this ideal "Mediterranean Sea" who, from the adventures of his most personal experience, wants to know how it feels to be a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal - as likewise how it is with the artist, the saint, the legislator, the sage, the scholar, the devotee, the prophet, and the godly Nonconformist of the old style: __ requires one thing above all for that purpose, great healthiness - such healthiness as one not only possesses, but also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one continually sacrifices it again, and must sacrifice it! __ And now, after having being long on the way in this fashion, we Argonauts of the Ideal, who are more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often enough shipwrecked and brought to grief, nevertheless, as said above, healthier than people would like to admit, dangerously healthy, always healthy again, __ it would seem, as if in recompense for it all, that we still have an undiscovered country before us, the boundaries of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to all countries and corners of the ideal known hitherto, a world so over-rich in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the frightful, and the divine, that our curiosity as well as our thirst for the possession thereof, have got out of hand __ alas! that nothing will any longer satisfy us!
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom

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Einstein Finds Inspiration in the Music of Mozart

A recent issue of the New York Times featured an inspiring essay by Arthur. L. Miller about two giants of modern history......

Last year, the 100th anniversary of E=mc2 inspired an outburst of symposiums, concerts, essays and merchandise featuring Albert Einstein. This year, the same treatment is being given to another genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on Jan. 27, 250 years ago.

There is more to the dovetailing of these anniversaries than one might think.

Einstein once said that while Beethoven created his music, Mozart's "was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master." Einstein believed much the same of physics, that beyond observations and theory lay the music of the spheres — which, he wrote, revealed a "pre-established harmony" exhibiting stunning symmetries. The laws of nature, such as those of relativity theory, were waiting to be plucked out of the cosmos by someone with a sympathetic ear.

Thus it was less laborious calculation, but "pure thought" to which Einstein attributed his theories.

Einstein was fascinated by Mozart and sensed an affinity between their creative processes, as well as their histories.........

.....he (Einstein) wrote four papers that were destined to change the course of science and nations. His ideas on space and time grew in part from aesthetic discontent. It seemed to him that asymmetries in physics concealed essential beauties of nature; existing theories lacked the "architecture" and "inner unity" he found in the music of Bach and Mozart.

In his struggles with extremely complicated mathematics that led to the general theory of relativity of 1915, Einstein often turned for inspiration to the simple beauty of Mozart's music.

"Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music," recalled his older son, Hans Albert. "That would usually resolve all his difficulties."

In the end, Einstein felt that in his own field he had, like Mozart, succeeded in unraveling the complexity of the universe.

This story is a beautiful example of the power of art and music to uplift and inspire. It also reminds us of the compelling and potent connection between science, art, and music - that a holistic approach to living is what we humans need to prosper and achieve great things!

Read the Full NYTimes Essay...

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The Greatest Thing a Soul Ever Does.......

From John Ruskin: British artist, scientist, poet, environmentalist, philosopher, and art critic.

The greatest thing a soul ever does….. is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way

............John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

John Ruskin (1819-1900)

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Destroying The National Parks

Yesterday's New York Times featured an interesting but very disturbing editorial on forthcoming policy decisions which may wind back the clock on America's National Park system.

Most of us think of America's national parks as everlasting places, parts of the bedrock of how we know our own country. But they are shaped and protected by an underlying body of legislation, which is distilled into a basic policy document that governs their operation. Over time, that document has slowly evolved, but it has always stayed true to the fundamental principle of leaving the parks unimpaired for future generations. That has meant, in part, sacrificing some of the ways we might use the parks today in order to protect them for tomorrow.

Recently, a secret draft revision of the national park system's basic management policy document has been circulating within the Interior Department. It was prepared, without consultation within the National Park Service, by Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior who once ran the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyo., was a Congressional aide to Dick Cheney and has no park service experience.

Within national park circles, this rewrite of park rules has been met with profound dismay, for it essentially undermines the protected status of the national parks. The document makes it perfectly clear that this rewrite was not prompted by a compelling change in the park system's circumstances. It was prompted by a change in political circumstances - the opportunity to craft a vision of the national parks that suits the Bush administration.

Go To Full Article

We recently visited the Grey Towers Estate in Milford, PA. Now owned by the National Forest Service, it is the former home of Gifford Pinchot and his wife Cornelia.

He (Pinchot) is the "father" of conservation in the United States; his ideas about managing trees and forests as a renewable natural resource have been studied and adopted for over 100 years - not only in this country, but around the world.

In 1898, Pinchot was appointed head of the Division of Forestry within the Department of Agriculture, and met Theodore Roosevelt, who became an immediate close friend. In 1901, when Roosevelt became President, he and Pinchot set aside millions of acres of forest land which were to be protected under a program of scientific management.

Visiting Grey Towers, it was hard not to get a feeling for the achievements of this great man. When he and Roosevelt worked together to create the basis for the national Forest Service and National Park System they were creating a legacy for all americans and their children.

By contrast, it seems that our leaders today are intent on dismantling anything remotely related to preserving the natural beauty of our planet. What is their plan I wonder? - to leave us with a legacy of indoor living under fluorescent lighting?

Mother nature seems to be having something to say about our treatment of her ocean and sky lately. I wonder how she will react to more carelessness in our national parks? Time to do everything we can as artists to record the beauty of our country while we still can!

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Another poem - "Voluntary Servitude" by Mark Wunderlich

Amy had a poem that really struck me here. I did some research on the poet, Mark Wunderllch and found another poem of his that I liked.

VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE

In a valley in Wisconsin there is a graveyard where the graves are flooded by spring.

You say, Don’t wreck me, and I say I won’t, but how can I know that?

To see a man in shackles, how you feel about that, depends on whether the servitude is voluntary

The bodies are intact in their gloves, soaked in a bath of ice. Hair a net around them.

Music does not console me. Words in books rise up and scatter.

A friend told me of a snake that came into her room one night.

The house was in Pennsylvania. She lived there alone.

In the dark she could hear it—dry, slipping onto boards like a stocking rolled from a leg.

It retreated when she turned on a light. There was a dark hole at the floor.

Residents disagree about the cemetery.

Some think to say the bodies are intact is wrong.

To suggest that there is anything abnormal is unfit thinking.

I have a new story to tell you.

In it, there is a girl. It’s a story a friend once told me.

Some forms of servitude are voluntary. Some shackles too—

Some you can remove. But this story—

you start in the middle, in the thick and marrow of it.

I think you’ll like it. Let me tell it to you.

Lying side by side. In the dark.

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A poem from the Living Poetry Blog

I got this poem from Amy's blog. She has the most wonderful poems there. Go check her out.

The Hammock

Your hand pushes me away
so that I float into the night,
then swing back, back from the nebulae
to our drifting conversation.

Among the race of star demons
what I saw out there--
golden chains, the spindle, sirens
chanting the music of the spheres--

blurs and streaks across star-flung
distances the chain-link fences
can't fence out. Between
your hand and the hammock's

slow rocking the Void
expands, twisting threads
tautening, slackening, stretched
almost to breaking:

Do you feel that wobble
of earth's axis, space
whirling past the ice-capped pole?
The pines like judges stare down at us:

What should we recant, here,
tonight, as if we'd only just begun:
Off-center already, losing
equilibrium? The world-soul moving

through the strung-out stars moves
in threads that creak and moan,
breathes between your mouth and mine.
Pushing me away, you bring

me home, your attraction drawing
down the alchemical sign:
Love draws the soul
the way a magnet draws iron.

From "The Dreamhouse" by Tom Sleigh

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Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

For those of you who haven't read Walter Benjamin's text "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" here's the link to the complete text.

Here's the introduction to the essay by Paul Valery:

"Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art."

Walter Benjamin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Benjamin was known during his life primarily for his philosophical essays and as a critic. As a sociological and cultural critic he combined ideas of Jewish mysticism with historical materialism in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to Marxist philosophy and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated texts written by Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire, and Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator" is one of the best-known theoretical texts about translation."

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A Lesson From A Mountain Goat

I was looking at photos of one of my favorite places this morning - Glacier National Park up by the Montana-Canada border. I originally posted this story last year but am bringing it out again in honor of the wonder of nature. Our experience with this mountain goat still haunts me in a sacred and wonderful way. When can I return?
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I had a heart-opening experience while traveling with Josse to Glacier Park earlier this year on one of her art journeys. One day we were hiking a pristine mountain trail to a place called Hidden Lake - it is a crater lake high up in the park and the walk is about 6 miles round trip.

About half way to the lake, we came across a mountain goat and her child. The first thing we noticed was how incredibly beautiful there creatures are - they are very white and have soft shaggy fur and cute little horns. The two goats were hovering around and eventually decided to sit down right on the trail. There were a few of us hiking and we all sort of stood around not knowing what to do. You just can't help wanting to stay around and observe these lovely beings. But also I have to say that I was a little concerned about how mom might react if we got too close to her baby.

So we did the only thing a sensible person could - we sat down on the trail too! In the few minutes we sat, it was as if the goats opened their world to share with us. What I felt was a very happy and yet slightly empty feeling of living totally in the moment. Noticing the change of the breeze, a smell wafting across, the sound of an eagle, or just feeling a momentary urge to eat. Very little mental baggage - just beingness.

In those few moments I realized that most of the times in life I had experienced happiness, that it had been more of a happiness of the mind than of spirit - a satisfaction of some urge or appetite. These mountain friends showed me that there is way more to experience beyond the mind - something very pure and in total harmony with all life.

Eventually the goats decided to move on, and we continued our journey to Hidden Lake. About two hours later on our return, we again encountered our fluffy friends. The mother was watching us very intently as we walked - every time we turned to look at her she was staring at us, so we stopped for a few minutes to observe more closely. What I felt was that there was something sacred taking place - through her gaze, it felt as if we were being officially welcomed to the park by one of its spiritual guardians. Very still, very pure, and very strong.

As we turned to leave something really interesting took place. Josse was waving goodbye to the mother goat and the goat was flapping her right ear. At first I didn't take notice, but then I saw a pattern emerging - Josse would wave for a few seconds and then stop. Then, the goat would flap her right ear and stop. Josse would again wave, then the goat would flap her ear again. Then I saw it - She was waving at us!!

In that moment, I saw how life's boundaries are very blurred and that love and respect for life are recognized as a common language between all beings - be they on two legs or four, and no matter the color of their skin or fur. I was very grateful for this lesson from two of Gods little messengers.

Sailing on the Ocean of Life

Thanks to Amy Grier for this poem on her blog "Living Poetry". Check out her interesting analysis of the poem's meaning.

WHEN'S SHORE LEAVE AGAIN?

Clusters of pinecones against winter green,
backdropped by cloudless blue sky.
Silently, afternoon passes between
the moment and eternity.

Captain, this absence of monsters and rocks--
sailor, shut up. Let it be.
The voyage from nowhere to nothing and back
beaten by drunk, brawling seas,

sometimes will toss up a treasure like this:
just hold to the stillness and see
shadows of what, on the island of peace,
waits with your name in her sigh.

JBMulligan

Big Wave by Josse Ford. © 2003.

Caroline Myss has these words to say on life is a spiritual journey from her book "Invisible Acts of Power."

"Vest yourself in the belief that your life is a hero's journey of spiritual progress. Mapping your way along the spiritual coordinates of purpose and compassion will help you navigate the storms of change. Life will never be a logical, rational, controllable experience. Some events and relationships will enchant us and others will crack us wide open with pain. Some people might win the lottery and other may end up broke through bizarre twists of fate, but we cannot outrun or outsmart the winds of change. Know that underlying the storm is peace, and under the chaos is order. Use the power of faith as your anchor: faith that there is a reason why things happen as they do; faith that you will make it through a crisis; faith that you are moving forward to a better place."

"Invisible Acts of Power: Personal Choices That Create Miracles" (Caroline Myss)

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