Giving Credit Where It's Due...the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William Blake

...just got back from the eye doctor because my artificial doors of perception are badly scratched...missing a nose piece, and, since I stepped on them on getting out of bed last week, badly mangled enough I decided finally to do something about it...could be there’s a metaphor in that somewhere...


As long as we associate happiness with getting what we want, we’ve associated it with exactly the opposite thing that makes us happy. Getting what we want doesn’t make us happy, not wanting makes us happy.
Adyashanti


...it's easy to envy the bliss we see in little kids, especially when it's brought on by so little...an ice cream cone or a favorite cartoon coming on...but, then, with that, there's the total abject wailing despair when the ice cream cone falls on the sidewalk or mom decides that's enough TV for today....there's definitely something to be said for the kind of quiet equanimity you see in older people...


Some say they can recall a thousand years
Some say they have already visited the next thousand years
On a windy day I am waiting for a bus.
Ko Un (stolen from the legendary Brooks, who got it from Yoga for a World Out of Balance, by Michael Stone)


...for a while now, been biking around Philly taking pictures of some of the amazing street art that’s appeared over the past couple decades, and have quite shamelessly used it to illustrate Yoga for Cynics posts (particularly this one and this one) as well as an Elephant Journal article. It wasn’t ’til recently, though, that I found out where all the art was coming from, and realized I’d been severely remiss about giving credit where it’s due. The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, led by Jane Golden, began as an offshoot of the city’s anti-graffiti network, channeling the talents of graffiti artists to benefit their communities as well as themselves, and is now, as America’s largest public art program, responsible for Philly having more murals on its walls than any city in the world, working with a variety of non-profits, including Philly’s own Yoga Unites, to empower young people through art. I should mention I’ve showcased only a tiny handful of more than 3,000 in the city, and simply the ones I happen to have biked, walked, or driven by and liked with camera handy. In fact, they're everywhere, including neighborhoods where you probably wouldn’t expect to see dazzling public art (and, actually, a few of the photos here were taken very quickly before skedaddling away...making it highly inconvenient to realize suddenly that my back tire was going flat)...

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...quiet November afternoon treading across arboreal curves high above the muddy banks of near-mythical Wissahickon Creek...exalted by Poe, as well as, in different registers, that motley assortment of dogs always swimming by the Kitchen’s Lane bridge...down from West Mt. Airy, State of Poignant Steady Exfoliation—which, quite unexpectedly last Tuesday, went green orange yellow even a bit of red as well as expected blue—along a narrow rocky path, not really marked on maps I don’t think but well traveled nonetheless...it makes no difference, not at all...feeling myself...but that didn’t come out right...or it did, but probably not conveying anything like what I meant it to impart...filthy minded readers...that sense of being embodied that gives an intense yoga session sometimes its more psychedelic qualities...the traipsing through some undiscovered country beneath and in the flesh...the body acoustic as well as electric...deep notes in every foot, toe, knee, back, neck, shoulder, head...knowing there...here...if only for a minute...then back to sleepwalking...along the muddy bank....

Now the Wissahiccon is of so remarkable a loveliness that, were it flowing in England, it would be the theme of every bard, and the common topic of every tongue....the brook is narrow. Its banks are generally, indeed almost universally, precipitous, and consist of high hills, clothed with noble shrubbery near the water, and crowned at a greater elevation, with some of the most magnificent forest trees of America....The immediate shores, however, are of granite, sharply defined or moss-covered, against which the pellucid water lolls in its gentle flow, as the blue waves of the Mediterranean upon the steps of her palaces of marble.
Edgar Allen Poe

All the bullshit of the past texts? Simply gossip. Simply someone else’s ahh-moments on record. What are you here to do? Discover your own.
Jennifer Schelter

I’m no fucking Buddhist,
but this is enlightenment.
Bjork

Now I’m wondering if I should title this post Feeling Myself...would that get me more readers, or fewer? Not that I’d have any problems with any connotations it might bring up...even if that’s not what the post is about...nothing worse, certainly, than Shakespeare using all those dick jokes to tempt groundlings away from the visceral thrills of bear-baiting for an afternoon of theatre....Once saw Jon Stewart—the man who, it must be acknowledged at this time, did as much as anyone to get me through eight years of tortured American history—asking a crowd of five thousand: if you’re a guy and you don’t masturbate, clap...and you could've heard a pin drop.... I told that to somebody and she objected to the singling out of guys. I said I didn’t know if it was the same thing, remembering all those Alice Walker type stories about women empowering themselves by getting in touch with their bodies for the first time when they’re like forty...when, for an adolescent boy it’s more like something that just happens...by sudden, unnamed, undefined, unprecedented, unbelievable imperative...and then happens again.....