Painting, I Ching, and Sanskrit.

I am really getting into Indian and Hindu culture and religion. So today, I was bored, so I drew on my white board an ohm symbol surrounded by a lotus, and then I wrote the Hare Krishna mantra in english on top and in sanskrit on the bottom. It was very interesting writing in a language I dont know. I sort of got to know some of the symbols and what they sounded like..mum came in and was all, how does that affect your Judaism and I thought about it. My approach is that all monotheistic religions (and Hindu because it is basically one God with many manifestations) have the same deity, whether they call it Allah, Adonai, God, Krishna, whatever! Anyway, it is all the same thing, just different approaches to the rituals and concepts surronding that God. So I really take it as being religiously diverse, I suppose. I embrace asoects of other religions and sort of adopt them into the mosh pit that is my religion. Dont even get me started on all the details. So I had this awesome picture on my whiteboard and I was like, hey, this is a whiteboard. It will be erased someday. So, I got out my paints, and painted it, with a few minor changes in color and medium. I had so much fun that I also made a painting as a tribute to John Lennon, and another one where I wrote that E.E. Cumming poem, I carry your heart, on a piece of paper in thin sharpie and then I painted differen symbols for love from different parts of the world. I have a western symbol, and African symbol, the chinese symbol, and an ancient Egyptian symbol I just threw in there. These are the symbols...

Western: I did a simple heart.

African: this weird moon and star thing, but not like the Islamic one...It's called an Osram Ne Nsorama..


The Chinese symbol: just google image chinese love symbol..

and the Egyptian symbol is a triangle. Triangles were apparently thought to symbolize knowledge and capacity, the capacity to learn and to love and to feel etc. So it's not directly a love symbol, but it is sort of.

I think my favorite is the ohm. The lennon thing is cool, and the love thing is...meh. It;s ok. whatever. A good idea, but didnt totally work the way I planned it.

Then my dad taught be how to do I Ching, which is this crazy cool fortune-telling type tap-into-the-chi-around-you-and-let-it-guide-you-in-making-the-right-decision thing. You throw coins and different patterns tell you what kind of line to make, and once you have six lines drawn, you go back to the book and look up the number of the line pattern and then you see what it all says. Tres cool. I was too tired to do it tonight.

I look forward to tomorrow, a day of baking cupcakes, carving punpkins, and studying for SSAT.