Last week I received an email from a well-known and I guess respected online tutoring service offering (for a fee) to teach me how to use my blog as a tool for expanding my photographic business. I read the email, shook my head “No Thanks,” and hit the delete key on my computer keyboard.
Call me naive or overly idealistic in a business sense, but, as I sit at my desk and type this, my 555th post since I began this online journal in 2007, “Seeing Small” has never been about self-promotion. If anything, it has been about other promotion...my hopeful belief that, because I nearly always have a camera with me and I make photographs of this, that, and the other thing -- small moments in life, mostly -- some of what I see might be enjoyed by others.
Today, dear reader, I thought I’d take you to a couple of events that my friends in the Pacific Northwest Tibetan communities have held recently and that I photographed on a volunteer basis. Above is a picture I made in May when the Dalai Lama visited and blessed a new Tibetan cultural center in Portland, Oregon. Below are images I shot two days ago as the Seattle Tibetans gathered and celebrated the Dalai Lama’s 78th birthday. There were prayers in the morning at the Tibetan Buddhist monastery, and, later in the afternoon, a picnic in the sunshine at a Seattle city park.
The Dalai Lama was in India on his birthday, and I read online that thousands of Tibetans waved banners and danced and school children sang prayers at a Tibetan university in southern India where the Dalai Lama spoke. He called for love and compassion to promote world peace.
Why do so many admire the Dalai Lama? Perhaps it’s because his messages of love and compassion remind us to think about others, and to get over our self-self-self-ness. Having now been around His Holiness in person and heard his gleeful laugh, I suspect he might be the most joyful 78-year-old on our planet.
