An incredible real time video of a full moon rise shot by Marc Gee of the moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, New Zealand. He writes:

“People had gathered up there this night to get the best view possible of the moon rising. I captured the video from 2.1km away on the other side of the city. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to photograph for a long time now, and a lot of planning and failed attempts had taken place. Finally, during moon rise on the 28th January 2013, everything fell into place and I got my footage. The video is as it came off the memory card and there has been no manipulation whatsoever. Technically it was quite a challenge to get the final result…”

Picture of the video (c)

In the news we read that all over the world bees are dying due to pesticides and/or parasitic mites. Bees pollinate three quarters of all crops, and their disappearance will cause a tremendous impact on our food production. While politicians and scientists are still quarrelling over the potential causes, the bee mortality goes on. Last Monday, the ministers of the EU decided about a ban of 3 pesticides – a result also of intense campaigning of NGOs, partly by flooding decision makers in Brussels with massive public mailings. The bee battle goes on.

This morning a Canadian friend sent the link to a fantastic video, “The Beauty of Pollination“, taken from a talk at TED by Louie Schwartzberg, director and cinematographer, saying “we are all dependent to each other”. I blogged about it before 1.5 years ago, but it is worthwile re-blogging. The full-length version of Beauty of Pollination, called “Wings of Life“, has been released on Blu-ray and DVD by Disneynature on April 16, 2013.

Picture from the video “The Beauty of Pollination” (c)

A Canadian friend sent me the link to this great Greenpeace video spot (1’30) for Earth Day, April 22nd, 2013. Very well done!

A picture from the Greenpeace video.

For quite some time the e-card module on the good-will site was closed – I had to do it because spammer abused it for some dirty mailings. Though my son had programmed some security measures, they weren’t enough. Now he included a captcha field, where you have to enter some letters before mailing. I”ll see if it is sealed now.

I changed most of the e-card pictures. You now find new photos from my collection and some of friends of mine. And I have added a number of pictures of my “Images of Synthesis” series. Below I left the paintings of Roerich and Rassouli as well as pictures of Buddhas and of Mount Kailash. So if you like, send a postcard to a friend. And if you find something not functioning, let me know. I have been checking the code on the different language pages, but I’m not sure I found all bugs… Enjoy.

Today the Sun and Mars enter into Taurus, so there is a change of the quality of time. December 12, while reading Spiritual Astrology, the chapter on Taurus, I was attracted by the lines:

“Beauty is the divine aspect of form. This aspect is governed by the sign Taurus in persons who live for art and who try to discover the sacred mission of art in tnis universe. Here lies the hidden significance of locating the ascendant of Lord Krishna in Taurus. Blue is the colour of this sign just as red is the colour of Aries. This truth is concealed in the fact that the colour of the incarnation of the lord as Krishna is blue.”

The impulse for the picture of this month was there but it didn’t show up clearly. There was the inner feeling saying,  just go ahead, and I had a vague idea of a cupola of stars, but nothing more.

So I started searching images with stars and constellations and cosmological motives, but I was not “hit” by a motive. Then I slowly started seeing the picture evolve: I took a photo of a Krishna statue here in my room, chose for the background an image of an extract of the Isenheim Altarpiece, by Matthias Grünewald, which I had in my room during my student years: the Light of creation emerging from God the Father, and angels dancing in the downpour. I extracted the Krishna statue from the photo and put it in front of the emerging light. I put as another background an extract from the stage set for The Magic Flute of Mozart by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, together with the dome of stars and integrated a part of an image of a peacock, Krishna’s bird. Then I started working on the colours.

Back in the computer, I realised that the central figure, Krishna with his magic flute, was too stale. During the next meditation, the idea came to add another layer of the statue in front of the one already in the picture and to choose a low transparency. I added a lot of dark blue and so the image emerged in violet. Wow, I thought, that is the right colour for Krishna with a “magic flute”. After some finishing work, adjusting colours to add brilliancy, the picture was ready. Here is the print version.

I love very much the book Music of the Soul by Master EK (Ekkirala Krishnamacharya), where he describes what is visualised in the painting. There he writes:
“When Krishna played his flute, he expanded into the vicinity in the form of his music: One consciousness thrilled through all the living beings. It started from the flute of Krishna and reached the ocean through the pool of consciousness of the humanity. Krishna began to come out of his body in the form of his exhalation as music. He began to expand into the pervasion of his presence. After a few minutes, music seemed to flow through the flute by itself and come out of the seven holes of the flute until it touched the heart of the humanity and soaked it in bliss. All seemed to be a wave of soul consciousness. No one existed except the one soul in all. The minds of all melted away and it was an ocean of existence.”

Taurus: The Magic Flute of Krishna

An Argentinian friend sent me the link to the video clip for the peace mantra “Sarvesham Svastir Bhavatu” recorded by Tina Turner, Regula Curti & Dechen Shak Dagsey on the album ‘Children Beyond’ – in Switzerland. See more on the Tina Turner blog.

The mantra means:
“May well-being, peace, wholeness and tranquility, hapiness and prosperity be achieved by all”. Sing it for peace of all sensitive beings, for calmness and harmony.

The Sanskrit text:

Om Om Om
Sarvesham Svastir Bhavatu
Sarvesham Shantir Bhavatu
Sarvesham Poornam Bhavatu
Sarvesham Mangalam Bhavatu
Om, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti

And there is another website of this project of inter-religious dialogue: Beyondsinging.com – a journey to the heart of spirituality. “BEYOND is a dialogue of religions, driven by a world-embracing language: music. Four women from different traditions united in their commitment for religious tolerance, invite you to accompany them on this journey.” See also the video linked there: “The Beyond Universe: Create your own mandala“.

Scene from the video – children singing the mantram

Cover of the CD: Children Beyond – With Children United in Prayer

Yesterday I got a beautiful time-lapse video about the opening of a rose. And here is a short extract from the book “The Teachings of Sanat Kumara” by Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar about a test with a rose a Master of Wisdom used to do with aspirants:

“To see how much harmlessness one carries, a Master of Wisdom used to play a trick. He gave a rose to the one who came to him and conversed with the person who held the rose in the hand. If the rose crippled with the touch of the person, he did not prefer to give wisdom to such a person. If the rose remained intact for long hours and continued to be fresh, he allowed them to get into the occult training. Observe the plants around you, the animals around you and the humans around you. If they blossom at your side, you are in a good way of harmlessness. If they shrink with your presence, observe that there is a lot to be desired in terms of harmlessness.”

Here are three other beautiful time-lapse videos.

A Rose for you:

A Canadian friend sent me the link to an astonishing balance act performance by a Chinese artist. I found the same balance act done by a Swiss artist, Lara Jacobs Rigolo, and this in a less showy feminine performance, with meditative music. A mastery of the forces of gravity.

And if you would like to see another meditative video, have a look at “Kawu Sun” (below) – beautiful scenes of weightless floating in water and encountering a sea cow / manatee. All videos have in common that they are an outer expression of inner balance, harmony and beauty.

Last weekend I was in Northern Germany for the annual CVV Sharing meeting. It was the 4th meeting, but for me it was the first. We were 36 WTT members – from Scandinavia, Germany, and me from Switzerland, meeting at a spiritual seminar centre on the countryside. It was a thrilling and very fulfilling experience in group integration. The meditative work opened a space to subtle spheres, and the meeting was an exchange in the spirit of synthesis. There was a team of organisers, but the group was the guide of the meetings. And though we all were different personalities, you could feel the profound and unifying potential of the group. There was a beautiful spiritual presence, which expressed through the group. And I enjoyed that for the first time I could present the new format of my paintings to a little public.

Morning light at the entrance of the seminar centre MaRah

Arrival / the entrance – cold and stormy wheather

The seminar hall and the inner yard

The candle and flowers in the centre of the hall

Early morning group meditation

Sharing – group experience

Master CVV – the inspirator of the meetings in the spirit of synthesis

In a little side-room I arranged a presentation of my images

Early morning light over a frozen pond

Though it was the beginning of spring, the temperature was – 8 ° C.

The group

Today at spring equinox I publish a book of poems (in German) called  “Schattierungen von Dus” (Shades of Yous). I wrote the 90 + 2 poems in June-October 2009. Now, 3.5  years later, they come out as a digital work. Each of the poems is illustrated by a photo illustrating the tonality of the content and some of the motives. To give you a vague idea of the poems, here is a PDF with an effort to translate some of the poems. And here you can download the German book as a powerpoint (9 MB) or as a PDF (10.6 MB, with Acrobat Reader bookmarks to each of the poems) to see at least the numerous photos (please download the PDF, in my PDF online-viewer the colours of the photos are bad). Most of them I shot myself, many were given by friends.

It was quite some work to edit the volume and I’m very happy that it is now ready. The poems speak about the reverberation of encounters, of wounds and their healing, of the dangers of the path and the surprises everyday life brings. To my surprise I noted that the “Schattierungen von Dus” appeared exactly 33 years after my first volume of poems, the “Gesang der Stille” (or as PDF) (Song of Silence), which I wrote in Aries 1980 and published end of that year, together with illustrations I did for the poems. Some of the motives of the new poems already were there in the old ones.

Enjoy reading / viewing.