My favorite time…
My favorite time to be at Dai Bosatsu Monastery in the Catskills is always the first week of October. The mountains surround the zendo, and the leaves start to change at the top of the peaks and then slowly the colors drift down. By the end of the week the monastery is surrounded by a brocade of color.
The large Bonsho bell in this photograph is nearly seven feet tall and five feet wide. It weighs about eight thousand pounds and its resonance can carry for twenty miles on a clear day. I”ll never forget the first time I ever heard it.
In was early morning, and still dark when it began to ring with an eerie sound, almost supernatural as though it came from the center of the earth. I was deep asleep when it rang out with one long boom. When the sound faded into the morning another boom echoed off the mountains. It penetrated through my dreams and I woke up completely mystified. What was that? I had never heard anything like it. It was mystical.
Zazen practice IS mystical. For me, it’s filled with mystery, awe, and fascination.
My new books
I recently published a series of photographic magazines titled Photographique A Journal.
In the mid-70s I was a professional photographer and this past summer I started looking through boxes and boxes of old contact sheets and negatives that I had put away on the top shelf of a storage cabinet far out of reach. I dug out the old 35mm black and white negatives, got a scanner, and went to work.
The first magazine I did is called Ghostly Mansions of the Hudson Valley. I took these photographs when I was in my 20s living at home in the Hudson Valley. At that time, there were a number of empty abandoned mansions nearby and I spent days wandering around photographing them.
The second magazine Erie Canal are photographs I took when I worked on a tugboat that hauled empty sand barges from New York Harbor to Buffalo along the Erie Canal which celebrates it’s 200th anniversary this year. I was the cook and made three trips, each one took over three weeks to complete.
The next magazine is titled Wabi with photographs that describe the Japanese term Wabi an over used word that I’ve described in a startling new way.
Each magazine is from 64 – 78 pages and you can preview them by clicking on the images above. This winter I’ll be working on a 4th in the series. I’m not sure yet what it will be called, but it will have images from my time in Aspen, Colorado when I lived there as a ski bum in the mid-70s.
I’d love to know what you think of these magazines. They are being sold at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY and here online. Please write me any critique to bettina [at] teahouspress.com
Enjoy!
Zen Sand
Bamboo shadows sweep the stairs
The dust does not move
Moonlight pierces to the pool’s bottom
The water is unmarked.
