Art By Tali Landsman

Heroes, Comics and Superheroes Art Project  I have always loved cartoons and comics. As a young child, I spent a short time in the hospital recovering from a hernia operation. My family came to visit and brought me a box of chocolate and some comics. I still remember lying in bed savoring both.  Philosophers, writers and analysts have explored why children love comic superheroes. Books have been written on the subject theorizing about why stories like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and the like, resonate so deeply in our collective psyche, and why they make such huge blockbuster movies grossing record high sales. Some say that the heroic myth helps counteract feelings of powerlessness that a child might experience within the family structure.  "Little children get to imagine themselves as superheroes, instruments of their own will—instead of subjugated weaklings, living in tiny bodies, who lack all agency," as one psychologist phrased it. Another therapist theorized that: ...

I am a slow painter. It takes me a long time to produce a painting that I like. I do not mind working slowly and meticulously, because by doing so, I try to minimize the mistakes that I make. Regardless, I make loads of mistakes during the process of drawing and painting, and often spend much time correcting my mistakes. Beside the time that it takes me to draw everything to my satisfaction, I also add layers of colors to create a nice opacity and a tonality that does not show the background canvas, nor leaves too many brush marks. The slow work is meditative and calming. I do not enter the studio with the intention of "finishing" today. I take my time and savor the long days painting. In fact, I always feel a bit of sadness when I near completion of a painting that I worked on for months.... It is as if I am saying goodbye to a friend that I spent many intimate days with.... I painted one single painting during the two winter months that we spent in Colorado recently. I call...

Whenever we travel around the world, we make a special effort to see inspiring local art. With the passing years, my tastes, interests and preferences about almost everything have changed. Take food, for example - years ago, I was fascinated by gourmet food. The intricacy of the flavors, the exotic ingredients combined to create unique artistic dishes, inspired me and delighted my heart. I have to admit that this is no longer the case. Now I prefer the sizzling freshness of ingredients in deliciously prepared street food to overpriced gourmet restaurants, whose food, according to my new taste buds, seems like over engineered tiny morsels that are largely unhealthy for me. When I think of superb food, my mind goes back to the steaming fresh Ramen eateries  in Hokkaido Japan, to the taste of fresh hand pulled noodles in Xian China, to the streets of Malaysia where you can eat the tastiest grilled Roti from a street cart, to the street foods of Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, to eating thi...

In my last post, I wrote about the fact that we do NOT live in a random Universe, but in a Universe that follows a Divine plan, and that nobody dies without their consent. I got a personal email comment from one of my readers, who asked me to clarify further. She asked if I were implying that all of those people on the Germanwings flight, even the little kids, on some subconscious level, chose to die? It is a fabulous question and one that opens the door to so many levels of understanding that I decided to take the opportunity to write another post on this subject. The simplistic, but no less true answer, is that those people DID NOT DIE. Death is not real. It is a misunderstanding. When you take a cube of sugar and dissolve it in a glass of tea, the sugar is not gone - it is still in the cup with all of its sweet essence - it just no longer exists in the form of a grain and a cube. When we no longer see a physical body, we assume that the person has died. But the physical was never mo...

The other day in a conversation with my mom, she asked me how I felt about the Germanwings depressed co pilot who had deliberately crashed the airplane with all the passengers onboard into the Alps. I normally pay little attention to current affairs as presented by the media. The reason for this is that without the perspective of a higher vision, current events seem to happen randomly, resulting in a belief that the world is a dangerous place, and that disaster can and does strike at any moment. But this is not true at all. In fact, most of our world's misery and woes come from exactly this unenlightened assumption. Allow me to expand on this. The Australian Aboriginal people have a charming practice which has run in their tradition for a very long time. When a baby is born, before they even attend to cleaning it, the mother holds the baby in front of her eyes and looking into its eyes, she says: "Welcome dear Spirit from Forever. Know that you are LOVED and SUPPORTED on this ...