Sacred Design

Sacred Design  Photography by Meera Rao 

Memory in the Raw

First Glimpse Digital photography

Long Day  Digital photography

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away. 

 ~Eudora Welty

Last month, while visiting family in Coorg in southern India, I stopped by to see the Golden Temple at Namdroling Monastery, a Tibetan Refugee Settlement in Bylakuppe.  Its been impressive to see how the settlement has grown and thriving over the years as they have added buildings and expanded.  I was glad to capture a few more moments in the monastery with my camera and add to my collection from previous visits :). 

Painting A Prayer

To witness the concentration, reverence and the skill with which the Buddhist monks construct a Mandala is a mystical experience. For the past ten years, every summer, we have had the privilege of looking into the Tibetan Buddhism and culture as the Monks spend a week paint and then ritually deconstruct a mandala. 'Rangoli' from India, Buddhist Mandala, Native American sand paintings all speak of yearning of the soul for enlightenment and I feel, are really painted prayers. Mandala Meditation is one of my attempts to capture that spiritual language. I originally posted this as one of the paintings in a slide show of my paintings last November, but decided this week, in honor of the Monks who are back in town, to post it by itself. You may check my other posts and paintings on this topic here. I am looking forward to watching the prayers unfold this week all over again.

Mandala Meditation, color pencils 11x14"

To Life!

As this photograph shows, Boston this past week was a reminder how life itself is mix of old and new. Blooming flowers were shaded by just budding  bare trees. Cool evenings reminded us of the traces of winter still lingering. I walked everywhere, even sketched a bit, soaked in the beauty of spring and also reconnected with a couple of friends.  It was somehow fitting that the one play we watched   'The Buddha, In His Own words'  conceived and brilliantly performed as a one man show by Evan Brenner spoke of  change as the only constant and the impermanence of everything. 

When we returned home two days ago, for about half an hour I was frantic looking for my house keys, imagining them to be left behind somewhere in Boston! Fortunately they were buried deep in my suitcase while I and searched for them in my purse.  Today I stumbled upon a wonderful story in New York Times (via charityfocus.org) about a couple who found a camera while traveling in Scotland and with online tools and cyber sleuthing found its rightful owners. Its really heartwarming to know that good samaritans are sill around! To Life! 

Renaissance

Today I watched a documentary "Dalai Lama Renaissance." Forty of the West's leading, innovative thinkers in their fields met at Dalai Lama's residence in Dharmashala in Northern India to discusss the world's problems and to see how they could solve them. What happened there was a transformation - most notably of their egos. Dalai Lama's simple message was that people all over the world only want happiness and 'secular ethics' together with compassion is the way to go. Thats a journey everyone was invited to take to bring about greater consciousness and understanding. 

Lotus - in Hinduism and Buddhism represents beauty and non -attachment. It grows in mud but floats on the water and remains unaffected by either the wetness or the mud. We are urged to live in this world without attachment to our surroundings. Lotus is also a symbol for the centers of consciousness -chakras - in the body.  I painted Lotus in watercolors on masa paper as a part of the series of paintings I created for my November show on India and on Mandalas.  I noticed that I had missed including it in the slide show on my earlier entry - so here it is :)