East Meets South

Lafayette Cemetery #2, New Orleans

These lines were taken from Liberation Through Hearing During The Intermediate State (Tibetan Book of the Dead), written in the 8th century to be read 49 days after death and before one’s rebirth:

Let consciousness rise up through your abdomen
up through your body
up through your neck
and finally out the top of your head.
Dissolve there into the light around you.

In this way you may enter directly into the pure realm of light.
The uncertainties of life will not affect you.
Recognition and liberation are simultaneous.

Listen without distraction.
You have not recognized your own nature
and now you experience painful uncertainties of life and death.
Give up anger
give up attachment
and give up yearning for relatives and friends.
Take refuge in the buddha.
With your head held high, enter the human realm
any distraction dissolving back into the heart.

Anything that has a shape will crumble away.
Anything in a flock will disband.
We are all like bees alone in the world
buzzing and searching with no place to rest.

Delusions are as various as the reflections of the moon on a rippling sea.
Beings so easily become caught in a net of confused pain.
May you develop compassion boundless as the sky
so that all may rest in the clear light of their own awareness.

Funeral Shoes, Backstreet Cultural Museum, New Orleans

The Original Lady Buckjumpers Annual Second Line Parade, 2011, New Orleans

The Stooges Brass Band lead the second line.

Link to:
Backstreet Cultural Museum and
More photos of The 2011 Original Lady Buckjumpers Second Line at Offbeat Magazine's Flickr page.