Wednesday, December 3, 2008

The benefit of seeing

This benefit of seeing... can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image... the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.
Dorothea Lange

8 comments:

BLACK AND WHITE said...

Beautiful view ...I want to be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate...

IstvanBloggin' said...

Yes, it really is beautiful, it's one of my favorite photos by Dorothea Lange. It is amazing how her photos speak the same truths as her words.
Glad you like it!

ArtPropelled said...

Both the quote and the photo speak to me. Beautiful!

IstvanBloggin' said...

Glad you like it, Robyn.
There's another quote that i find related, by Joseph Campbell: "One looks, looks long, and the world comes in."

Cécile said...

These words sound quite oriental, almost buddhist; I always find it so difficult to pause and medidate. Sometimes I feel that strong forces run through me and my life, upon which I have no power.

IstvanBloggin' said...

You are right, our western civilization made our lives full of speed, haste and unfinished sentences. I have always loved all that in a way, cluttered busy streets of huge cities fill me with energy, make me faster. I don't think that eastern philosophy can be applied to our life style literally, because it is totally opposite to it. But i guess the trick would be to look as long as we can, and use all the time we have,(no matter how short that is) to look behind the surface of the thing we're looking at, to look deeper.
Or maybe to look with passion.

ArtPropelled said...

....to consciously make the time to contemplate, to pause, to extricate oneself from that madness, to focus on the moment. If I didn't take little pockets of time-out I would go insane. It really is so necessary otherwise life becomes a blur and we actually stop seeing.

IstvanBloggin' said...

Yes, life would really be a blurred routine without those focused moments.