Myōhō Renge Kyō is the Lotus Sutra and the purpose of chanting this Mantra is to awaken the soul so that it will be able to fight against the daimoku, a Japanese demon that stands in the way of man and Buddha.

I titled my video this way because when I first walked down to Wall street the very first people I met were the Japanese monks circling the perimeter of Zuccotti Park chanting this mantra as if they were trying to bless the territory. It was such beautiful and peaceful sight to see. In the middle there was chaos and yet it was contained by these three monks walking around in circles repeatedly to keep calm and protect the protesters and their ideals.

I wanted to show this side of Occupy Wall Street in my video.
I wanted to show the tents, the sleeping bags, the circle of musicians singing on the top of their longs “we are the 99%,” I wanted to show all the calls for “mic check,” the food bank and the clothing swap, the beautiful artwork and the political debates. But I wanted to do it with that same peaceful touch those Japanese monks showed me during my week of filming.

Why? Because behind any revolution there is a peaceful intent, it’s not all about the range and the fight, the final intent is that all will get along. This video is a contribution to that hopeful feeling behind. The OWS protests and marches to which I took part several times had the peaceful intent of changing the present toward a better future.

May this video as many other contributions help keep that a reality alive not only for the OWS movement, but also for the many others to come and go because the organization of the masses toward a rigid and unfair government is the only real weapon we have to defend Democracy, and we, as the people, should exercise this power anytime we feel threatened.

Why, in the love of God, am I writing an entire blog post on vespas? No idea how to spent a Monday night at home other than fantasizing over this, I guess. Or maybe, I am just about to go turn our little vespa on and take a nice, long, night ride all over Rome….Not sure yet, but I shot this photo yesterday at the Bolsena Lake about 2 hours outside of Rome and I have been thinking about the summer in which I was riding my (then red, now light blue) vespa all over the city like a free bird and I guess nostalgia kicked in to remind me once more how much I love this city of mine, but how much more all I have left here *(vespa aside) it’s part of a past I do not belong to anymore…most of my old friends are gone, I am not in high school anymore and my favorite croissant place does not exist anymore, yet the vespa is still parked in the same garage below my house.

How can one learn to be detached from all this if every time I come home for the holidays I feel as I were 19 again as I slip into the old bed I left 11 years ago and everything else looks the same around me?

My new year’s resolution is to learn how to love what’s about to come realizing I have loved what has come before very much, but time has come to let it go. This unknown future of mine, which I fear daily because so obscured and un-readable is the reason to live for, I can’t continue living in the past anchored to memories of friends departed, places no longer present and tastes and smells never similar to the ones of today. The one of an immigrant is a very, very, very unreal and platonic past. A dazed and confused past, one that is impossible to described because it makes us feel melancholic and happy together, it gives us a sense on non-belonging, but also a sense of powerful independence. Nobody, but an immigrant can fully understand the meaning of a past lived in two countries, with two separate identities and way of life.

But this year, the 11 year of my American adventure, I want to move on to live in a dimension of the present enjoying every bit of every hour of every day so that my future can be better off that any past I have ever had. I do not care to live in a memory lane cage any longer.

Amen!

ps: I promise never again to write about life, vespas and the meaning of past, present and future on a full-moon night because the influence of such element may have severely skewed my perspective over it all and may have made this entire blog a complete fluke. But, yet again… this is the whole fun it!

Happy New Year, may this one be nothing like you imagine it to be, but possibly better!

If you would have asked me a week ago, I would have told you that I was still indecisive about whether or not circumcision was indeed a cruel act performed on such a small creature. But after today, I have, most certainly, a different opinion.
The Brit Milah may be one of the most spiritual moment I have ever experience within Judaism. Although I was extremely disturbed by this beautiful baby turning bright red screaming with pain from the Rebbi cutting off part of his sexual organ, I was also deeply touched by what the whole gesture meant for this boy. He will grow-up to be a man, a Jewish man with a sign to remind him of his religion anywhere and anytime. In few years time, he won’t ever remember this moment *(unless he asks me to sell him this photo?), but he will for ever remember where he came from.
And, no, this is not a rallying cry to say Judaism is the best and only religion existing, but just to say that seeing his parents, close and extended family proud faces united around this wonderful 8-days old baby on the day he was welcomed not only to the world, but to the Jewish faith, was more powerful that I expected.
The birth of a child, especially in an orthodox Jewish community it’s the biggest blessing of all because a child, a male child even more, is the successor to the tribe, the one who will carry on the Torah’s teachings, so his entrance into a community it’s holy. He represents the passing of generations and the future of others this is why his act of coming into society is made so wonderfully pure itself. ,

And yes, no question the ritual had something almost sadistic to it and the Rabbi’s sucking of the blood off the little boy appendage to avoid infections was crude *(and unexpected) to watch, but all part of a thousands years old tradition that we all (one way or another) belong to. And so today there is not judgment, there is not right or wrong, there is no kid’s right vs. parental decision, there is only the Torah and the commandments that God told 100-year-old Abraham. And this is just perfect.

Now, when it will come my kid’s turn, I may faint, but today instead I took some photos!

In any case, welcome to the world Elyasaf Yisrael, I promise to sell you the rights to these photos when you turn 18 as of today’s decision was not yours, but your parents. In any case, Mazal Tov and welcome once again…

So I have got an obsession. A healthy one though, or at least that’s what I think: I like photographing Jewish people. I mean, I do it all the time, even one-handed when biking on Kent Avenue and not really knowing I have a car behind me ready to run me over.
As a matter of fact, I do it not because of work, but because it speaks to my heart. I do it because in those people I see my little self at 14 reading Jewish novels on my parents bedrooms. I take photos of Orthodox Jews because they are not the me of today, but they were part of my childhood dreams of the past. When I see them coming home from synagogue in the streets around Williamsburg, my heart just jumps up in my chest and iphone or else I have with me at that moment, I have to try capturing what they are doing. Those few little gestures bring me back to the pages of “The Chosen One” from Chaim Potok.
This shot is not entirely what I was hoping for:There are no women in the picture, plus many adverted consequences played against me. I was in fact managing to pedal as close as possible to my subject without him seeing me, then holding my bike between my legs, and pulling out my iphone from my back-pack pocket in a 007-semless way to try being as quiet as possible but yet indadvertedly almost falling on my face twice doing so. This photo it’s really all I could possibly swing.

Oh, well…what’s important is that I had a blast taking this shot and I manage to still keep both phone and bike intact. Now, if only the subject matter had a long, brown wig, some kids around her and maybe a husband dressed in the Saturday morning suite, then I would have had the perfect shot, but then again…photojournalism is about getting what you see to be interesting at a spare moment just like this one that happened to me today. So here I plead guilty for wanting something a little different from what was indeed just placed upon my eyes just perfectly the way it was.

I guess what was really interesting is that the boy stood there for something like two whole minutes, looking at the painting on the wall trying to figure out what it meant and then simply walked away untouched. When he turned around, it was a bit too late to pull out my other camera. He saw me and the whole hide-and-seek game was over. He almost got scared, turned around, looked at the graffiti once more and walked away from me wordlessly.

I think I may randomly find myself at quarter past 12 every Saturday afternoon at that same corner from now on!

I have never been to India, I have never washed myself in the holy waters of the Ganges, I never took classes with Pattabhi Joyce at Mysore, and I have never, ever in a million years thought I would become vegan, would meditate daily and would go out on a Friday night for Kirtan instead than for red wine. But life is unpredictably weird that way and so here I am, three months into this life-long commitment to my spiritual guidance, Sri Dharma Mittra, and so happy to be part of “his loving army of saving souls” as an almost-graduated Dharma Yoga teacher.

And no, this is not a commercial to promote some super-power Dharma yoga teachers may have, it’s just a way to explain that teaching yoga is far from teaching aerobics or steps. Practicing and teaching yoga can change you from the inside out making you so much more aware of your true, natural being. With the study of yoga, your soul it’s revealed to you and it becomes a mirror for others. Once a mirror is created, many more can come from that and so the army of “soul saving soldiers” is molded one after another with the belief that we are all one, made of the same “divine material.”
The physical part of yoga it’s the first step to “soul clean-up,” the grosser one of them all. But when that’s done…one goes deeper into the inner self, below the dirt and the multiple masks put upon from years of lies and “pretending happiness” and gets to the core of it all, the Supreme Self, the drop of God that resides in every living being’s heart. Once you get to know that part of yourself, everything else is easy to understand, because everything else is just a mere illusion compared to the reality of what lies beneath it all.

Before one becomes a yoga teacher one has to experience it all on her own skin *(the strict diet, the demanding meditation, the ethical rules, the devotion and respect toward your Guru, the tapas to continue practicing even when there seems to be no more strength left, the reading of tedious scriptures and the faith in the belief of something intangible and inexplicable). Then, one can even began thinking of teaching such learnings to someone else.

“A teacher instills into the disciple a great spiritual power that within time will allow the disciple to have spiritual emancipation,” from the Anaduta Gita, a sacred Yoga text Dharma’s Swami used to read to them when he was in the Ashram in the early ’60s. “No matter how distant a teacher and a disciple are, they share a psychic connection, the obidient and reveret student automatically becomes part of the guru’s aura,” added Sri Dharma Mittra in his spiritual discourse on Nov. 15, 2011.

Dharma is a living proof of what it means to know yourself to the deepest level. He is the most self-controlled human being I have ever met and his balance of mind and spirit it’s just remarkable and it seems almost as if he has not knowledge of how calm and serene he looks and feels to everyone around him. Being in his presence it’s both inspiring and humbling. He is a spiritual guidance for all who are seeking to see past their physical bodies and go deeper to get to know that other part of “us,” the spiritual voice inside that wants to come out, but does not know how. Dharma is the light to show you how to get there. But words cannot even begin to explain…you must meet him in person

Part of the main problem in the western world, though, it’s that yoga asana *(poses) has become a commodity for many and, since the beginning it has been advertised as more of a physical exercise than a philosophy to self-knowledge. Yoga poses are just stretches for the body and there is little to no knowledge at all to the true benefit each posture has not only on the physical body parts, but also on a more spiritual level…so people do not often get the full benefit of yoga, which is indeed better than any therapy you may have tried.

Words can only in part describe what it feels to be one with body and mind without doubts on who we truly are and to bring this belief about to your everyday life outside of the yoga mat and make you realize that you can really transform everything to yoga. From the act of offering help to a friend, to avoid being so needy all the time, to the welcoming of changes in your life *(positive or negative ones) with an ever-changing attitude of steel. Yes, it’s indeed possible to see life from different sunglasses, with some diverse UVA filtered lenses and control our reactions to what we see and how we see it without getting thrown off our balance every time, it just takes some practice. And yoga, for me at least, it’s step 1, 2, 3…9 and 10.

I am ready to share this knowledge that brought me up to here…who is in for some learning!

I have known Cate since the time she used to go by as Casey. We were 21 and our afternoons were spent talking about life, philosophy and boys by a fireplace in a run-down basement apartment on Baseline and 16th street in Boulder, Colorado where we both went to college. Red wine was a must and our friend Lizzie, the mature one of the group, was the goal keeper. Almost ten years later, we find ourselves with parallel lives in New York City: She, the Cabaret singer, me the freelance photojournalist. When she was to become a personal counselor and I was supposed to be the doctor in the family.

But, the beauty of it all, we are as happy as one could be knowing that the lives we had chosen were indeed not fit for us, but just conformed to what we thought we were made of, without knowing so much more.

I was invited to photograph Cate on stage during a dress rehearsal she hosted a couple of weeks ago. I had photograph Cate before during a live performance, but I could not really move around in the room much. This time I could clim on chairs, tables and even go on stage next to her. I rarely have so much fun as I had that Thursday morning. And yes, I cried when Cate sang “Mama says, you can’t hurry love, love will come easy it’s a game of give and take…” and I do not feel cheesy about, I just feel incredibly lucky to have the coolest job in the world and to enjoy every bit of it daily!

ps: Her full name is Cate Cox and she has been performing live at the Duplex for a few months…but expect sometime more coming up very soon!