Los que me conocen en vivo saben que no soy muy conservador que digamos, pero sigo practicando la fe de una manera muy particular. Hace poco tuve una experiencia personal muy fuerte que necesita de mucha meditación.
Aunque he aprendido a hacer ejercicios de respiración en mi práctica del aikido, al menos en mi caso he notado que mi mejor ayuda para meditar es simplemente rezar el rosario. Ya que estuve 11 años en una escuela de monjas dominicas y padres franciscanos, el rezo del rosario es algo que conozco muy bien (aunque para aventarme las novenas sí necesitaría un libro).
Después de un par de misterios, he notado que mi respiración es regular y mi mente se encuentra en blanco, como en cualquier buena meditación. Tanto aprender filosofías orientales para terminar usando algo con lo que crecí 🙂 . Independientemente de las creencias de uno, me pareció lo suficientemente interesante como para compartirlo.
I’ve always been interested in finding out “the other side of the story”. That was one of my main incentives in learning foreign languages, and the reason why I usually scan international newspapers. As a recent project put me in constant contact with Turkey, I was able to pick up this book at Istanbul airport and was able to read it through. While this blog gives a longer review of the book than I’d be willing to write here, the most interesting bit of the whole book was that for the peoples comprising Medieval Islam, Europe was an uninteresting barbaric fringe following an antiquated superseded religion, and so approached their contact with Europeans from a stand of perceived moral superiority. Not unlike the way Europeans viewed the peoples of the New World in the 1500’s.
The book then gives a summary of how those attitudes changed with the faster European development of the Renaissance to a situation where while European technical, scientific & military expertise was sought after, cultural contact was still avoided. 300 years later, the situation is starting to change as can be seen in the TED talk below:
Disclaimer: I know Turkey is in general much less traditionalist than other Muslim countries. It is generally agreed that the push West was started by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, which was not covered in this book.
I recently met a student of cultural anthropology and had a very stimulating conversation like I haven’t had in a long time outside of work. Her main area of interest are cultural areas in cities, and when I mentioned that the part of Mexico City where I grew up is somehow similar to the part of the Helsinki metro area where I live now as they’re both suburbs we got off to a good start.
During the course of this conversation she mentioned the phrase that gives its title to this post, and it got stuck with me. The first example that came to my mind was that of the different manifestations of the Virgin Mary: in Europe she’s Caucasian, in Mexico she’s mestiza and in China she’s Asian. However, I have been reflecting more on that given the current chapter in the Finnish immigration debate, where a university professor has pretty much reached the same conclusions as Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (conclusions with which I couldn’t agree less).
The other reason why this phrase is stuck in my head is because in the past few days through analysing my behaviour (and a couple of faux pas) I have found a couple of things I’m not sure I like too much about myself. Then again, the first step in enacting change is discovering what the desired state is.
Como cualquier persona que creció en México, la Semana Santa no es igual si no te ponen películas referentes a la fecha, especialmente clásicos como Quo Vadis? o Ben-Hur.
Como en Finlandia eso realmente no lo hacen, ya estaba bastante desacostumbrado, pero pueden imaginarse mi sorpresa cuando veo el Viernes Santo que en ZDF, un canal alemán que me llega por cable, estaban pasando Ben-Hur. Aunque mi alemán está un poco oxidado, me puse a ver la película y la verdad es que me acordé mucho de cuando estaba chico.
