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The Spirit of Place Expeditions
Professor Stanley Ira Hallet, FAIA
Former Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.
The Spirit of Place
Fifteen years ago, an architect named Travis
Price approached me with a most interesting
proposal. Having recently arrived from the
University of Utah to head the then Department of
Architecture at The Catholic University of America
in Washington, D.C., I was determined to redirect
a program considered by many of my colleagues to
be lacking in energy, vision and commitment. My
own interests in education were diverse: I had, as an
architect, Peace Corps Volunteer, Fulbright Scholar
and husband to a documentary filmmaker, an eclectic
background in anthropology, traditional architecture,
filmmaking and theory.
Although responsible for the never-ending management
and fund-raising activities required of today’s
higher academies of learning, from early on I also
developed and taught studios and support courses
exploring cultural issues, focusing on the inevitable
need to interven e architecturally within cultures of
great diversity. Within these explorations, the studios
often addressed three over-riding themes: the found
landscape as an underlying definer of both the agricultural
environment and gardens of reflection and
retreat, the continued history of human settlement
within the fabric of the built and grown environment,
and, finally, the making of sacred space. Further
complicating these was the issue that these once
well defined cultures were undergoing transformations
that threatened traditionally historic responses,
resulting in the often dysfunctional conditions that
characterize many of today’s modern habitats. Given
these conditions, how are we, architects of the
twenty-first century, going to intervene How will we
propose architectural, landscape, or urban interventions
that acknowledge a long history of cultural
place-making, at the same time reflecting our own
time and our global perspective, often the roots of
the very problems traditional cultures are struggling
with in their attempts to redefine themselves
I was also convinced that the school needed to
revisit the physical reality of building, the recognition
of new materials, and the many ways of assembling
them. This was leading our efforts in model making,
furniture design and the construction of modest but
full-scale design/build projects. Gather all of these
interests in the context of a Catholic university dedicated
to exploring the moral problems associated
with the sacred as well as the profane, and we were
now ready to consider the arguments and programs
passionately advocated by Travis Price.
❖ ❖ ❖
In the summer of 1992, Travis proposed taking
ten to fifteen architecture students to the far reaches
of our continent to design and build interventions
within well-defined landscapes, sites that reflected
equally a long history of working and reworking both
the profane and sacred. Called “The Spirit of Place,”
these workshops in the field encompassed focused
studies of a place and its inhabitants as well as
exploring the deep belief systems, myths, and stories
that defined them. The preliminary cultural studies
performed in school were intense, and the student
building proposals reflected the issues uncovered.
They also responded to the practicalities of building
on remote sites with little funding, limited resources,
and relatively unskilled student labor, as well as the
need to erect the interventions over a short period
of construction, never more than ten days.
Our students immediately took to Travis and
his unabashed enthusiasm for the underlying myths
associated with our planet’s cultural and physical
landscapes. What unfolded was a fourteen-year
history of interventions in cultural settings often
completely foreign to the quotidian experiences of
our predominantly East Coast undergraduates. The
results formed a continuity of built work illustrating
Travis’s core beliefs, and provided an experience that
dramatically affected the lives of the hundreds of students
who participated in the Spirit of Place projects.
This, in turn, continued to inspire Travis’s own work.
Whether built on the windy, rocky coasts of Ireland
or floating in the middle of a jungle river filled with
piranhas, the architectural constructs have become a
living testament to the students’ endeavors, and continue
to provide a laboratory testing the ideas deeply
imbedded in Price’s architecture.
Continually searching for connections to the site,
Travis’s work raises age-old questions still associated
with today’s tired and neglected landscapes. How
will I sit on this unique piece of land and how will
it inform me and those that follow me How will I
respond to the constant companions of sun, rain and
weather, the ever shifting patterns of day and night,
the seasons with their hot and cold, the constant
eroding of the soil and the plants, birds and animals
they shelter How did man first inhabit these places
How does each culture reshape them to respond
to its own needs, its own beliefs and its own rituals
of work, play and reflection Finally, how do we, as
products of our own time and conditions, participate
in this landscape today
Travis continues to expand upon the work of his
students, seeking an understanding and interpretation
of place that embodies the timeless qualities of
cultural history and fit. His work seeks to recognize
the importance of cultural myth informing the very
fiber of our bodies: it colors, shades and transforms
how we perceive and find meaning in the world that
surrounds us. His work builds upon and heightens
this awareness, aspiring to define space that accommodates
both the profane and the sacred, work
and play, and, most important, our need for retreat
and reflection. In so doing, he seeks an alternative
position to both the post-modernists who appropriate
the past in terms of its form and proportion and
the deconstructionists who take apart the present to
comment upon its dystopian condition. Travis is less
interested in historic forms; he is more concerned
with the forces that once shaped them. He avoids
the copying of inherited façades, but instead explores
the dark alleyways of the unresolved forces lurking
behind them.
❖ ❖ ❖
Recognizing contemporary facts, he is very comfortable
with the inventive use of modern materials
and construction methods. Travis seems to infuse
the final assembly of a building with a sense of place
that permeates every component. He marries hard
architectural fact with soft vegetal surroundings. Tree
and wall co-exist. Materials rust while plants grow tall,
only to fall to the ground when their time has come.
Travis suggests an architecture that recognizes
the complex interrelated histories of time and place.
He learns from their stories, but then moves on. He
champions these issues, retelling them with a new
voice that is accommodating while at the same time
courageous and inventive. The resulting work is of
our time, expressive of the unresolved issues and
conflicts that dominate our lives, yet providing space
for repose, refection and respect. He offers a new
perspective, a new alternative, a new vision for those
of us obliged to intervene with our constructions.
The urban and rural landscape, the architecture
and gardens we make, are but the consequences of
the cultural values that define them. Architecture is
but the concretization of belief systems we hold so
dearly. For better or worse, the resulting architectural
environment reflects our condition and the historic
battles waged to define it. The work of Travis Price
in his practice and in the unique laboratories at The
Catholic University of America is committed to
improving these conditions by recognizing and understanding
the potential of the past to inform, in new
and inspiring ways, the environment of tomorrow.
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SUKHAVATI AND THE NAGAS…
NEPAL, THE NAGA SHRINE
My office was commissioned to design a large
project in Nepal a few years back, an Ayurvedic
yoga retreat. Half the owners were totally ready to
embrace the philosophy of metaphorical modern industrialism;
the other half still wanted the nostalgic
past reproduced. The debate was so crucial that the
mayor of Kathmandu convened his entire planning
staff to discuss our one project as a vision for the
sacred city’s growth aesthetic.
Half of the investors came from a nostalgic, ex
pat world, there to escape the industrial world and
wanted to live in literal remakes of Nepali villages,
but with electricity and toilets, cell phones, six servants
and of course never-ending instant chai. They
faced the classic question for any Eco resort today:
how do we keep an authentic spirit but introduce
high tech advantages Eco resorts, because they’re
pricey, can afford to ask these questions. Why can’t
that be the format for built environments everywhere
You can live ecologically within a cool, hip,
modern architecture that has different flavors and
different sights and different cultures, all within a
subdivision. The answer, we hear constantly, is that
nobody has enough money and enough vision to
take the risk to build them. The money is really the
same, it’s the vision that’s missing.
I took on a “Spirit of Place” expedition in Nepal
in conjunction with designing the larger project.
The site was at the base of Nagarjun Mountain; the
theme was to design a meditation shrine dedicated
to the Sukhavati (Place of Bliss ) & the Naga (Snakes
of Knowledge).
In nine days, we built a cantilevered platform
over a hundred-foot drop, stretching out above a
sea of cobras, leeches and nagas, where one could
sublimely sit on a glass mandala held by a single
steel beam. It wiggled as you stepped out and
vibrated slowly as you sat down, finally diminishing
its shaking as your own fears subsided and the inner
voyage began.
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Above: Nepalis, Newaris, ex-pats, students, and teachers.
Photograph by Chris Rainier. Opposite: Meditation over
100-foot cliff on glass floor—Nagajune Mountain beyond.
Photograph by Chris Rainier.
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BELMULLET
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WIDENING THE THIN PLACE…
During the design-and-build course for “Spirit of
Place,” a simultaneous design studio project was
also undertaken for a library and community center
to be located in the village of Belmullet, County
Mayo, again on the western coast of Ireland. The
site is on a narrow canal, which splits off a large
peninsula from Erris and the mainland. It is both a
major demarcation and genus loci of the area, as
well as a natural thin place. How to take the lyric
of a single object in the landscape and make whole
buildings was the heart of this project and the intent
of the studio.
One idea was to have the one building become
two buildings on each side of the banks using curved
glass facing each other. Each face is out over the
river so that people in two opposite buildings are
looking at each other, and the glass is cantilevered
perhaps only a few feet apart. They could signal to
each other but not touch. The two buildings then
curve away. Just to have that moment in the public
hallway on both sides, to have people walking back
and forth and not being able to do anything other
than communicate with body language, was a playful
gesture about a thin place.
Another design used a series of buildings in a
running parallel formation broken into a series of
functions: the library, the reading stacks, the reception
area. Buildings where bridges—and stripes
of thin places—run parallel to each other, parallel
infinities divided by function.
Another design idea was a series of undulating
copper green tents reflecting on a single top as a
moment of time constantly changing its position, as
nature does. The concept was that as you moved
along the buildings, the pinnacle point for each one
changed its location so that you saw time marching
along linearly, but at the same time, when you
put them all together, you got a sense of time going
back and forth. Aside from an image of undulating
bogs, the design puts you into the thin place with its
rhythmic, seesawing effect.
All of these wonderful designs, simultaneously
designed as a future 100,000-square-foot environmental
center inspired by the “Thin Places,” prove
unequivocally that large-scale modern architecture
designed with the three lenses could simultaneously
come from the landscape and capture the mythic.
Top left: Model by Kimberly Johnson. Time depicted by
changing moments or pinnacle peaks. Top right: Model by
Natali Lomeli. Parallel buildings separated by thin places.
Middle left: Model by Kimberly Johnson. Moving bog tents
of copper in field of wind machines. Middle right: Sculpture
model by Deborah Lerner. Rings of time moving forward
and backward simultaneously. Left: Model by Natali Lomeli.
Endless lines to infinity of time interrupted by hushed
whispers. All photographs by Travis Price.
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THE THIN PLACES: DOONAMOE
Simultaneously that year, we built another project.
It too was a “t’in place,” the big brother of Anagh
Head. The site was a large blowhole in the ground
where the sea has eaten the land from underneath,
about 100 feet below the surface. The sea
had been continuously bashing the rock cliffs for
many hundreds of centuries. It bored under the
rocks and shot straight up, blowing a hole through
the solid granite land mass. When the gale winds
are coming and the 200 foot waves are hitting, it
shoots a spout, like a whale’s, hundreds of feet up
into the air.
The astonishing magic of these two enormous
projects—besides their mystical impact—
was that we actually built them simultaneously
in nine days flat-out. At Anagh Head, the land is
pushing into the sea and at Doonamoe the sea is
pushing into the land. You can see them one from
another, four miles apart along the coast. The seesaw
effect of land-eating-sea and sea-eating-land
when viewed simultaneously was to experience
the paradoxical nature of the thin places—extraordinarily
magnified!
We could just barely see each other working
on a clear day. I was zooming back and forth with
three cell phones, twenty-five students, twenty
Irishmen, often getting lost in thick foggy patches.
Hats off to the students and the local Irish
craftsmen: they all did amazing things. Hats
off to the philosophy they experienced during
these grueling expeditions, in concert with their
personal interpretations of Stillness, Movement
and Nature: the structures have had an enormous
impact on the local people, myself, the students
and the quest for the Mythic Modernist language
of architecture.
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Previous spread: Rainbow over beehive exploding to the
sea at Anagh Head, Ireland. Photograph by Chris Rainier.
Top: View from above of student model. Photograph
by Travis Price. Above: Sunrise view with thistle of steel
greeting wisps of clouds. Photograph by Chris Rainier.
Opposite: 110-foot waves crashing against cliff edge;
Equinox axis path to steel cage above the blowhole.
Photograph by Eamon O’Boyle.
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THE THIN PLACES: ANAGH HEAD
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One Spirit of Place student project, our ninth, was
in Ireland, a stunning example of going to a site,
looking at powerful environmental forces, being
overwhelmed with a living metaphor and producing
uncanny results in just nine non-stop days of
rain-soaked construction. We built two projects
simultaneously on the west coast, where the Irish
are still absolutely mad. The rational world is always
secondary there to the realms of poetry and living
myths. Nearby is Yeats’ Donegal, Sligo and the
magic of Galway. This is where Yeats and Joyce
would retreat to from Dublin to find their inspiration;
Crough Patrick pilgrimage mountain beckons
nearby. This is where Patrick married the worship
of the sun with the Son. This is where the poets
escaped to, to find the deeper mythic soul of their
Gaelic blood.
One theme kept coming up as I walked around
asking people about mystical lore. Of course every
rock there has about ten tales attached to it so I
got a bellyful and then some. The Irish are greatly
beloved fibbers with endless exaggeration, and
because they’re great liars they’re great storytellers,
which in turn makes them phenomenal writers.
They love to twist and turn, not to evade, but
actually to delve into more complex meaning. They
dance with the truth. So what seems like a contradiction
or lies isn’t really so; it’s actually another way
of seeing things. It’s where being in a paradoxical
state is the norm. Such a view of reality exists in the
landscape and the mind. In the landscape, such real
locations are often referred to as the “thin places.”
After hearing from many locals, I asked Seamus
Caulfield, Ireland’s premier archeologist, “What is a
thin place” In the pub, several people’s eyes lit up.
He smiled, his eyes mystified and mischievous all at
once. “Ah, the t’in places; I’ve encountered them.”
(“T’in” with no “h” is the Irish pronunciation.) In
Irish life they are the places where time past, future,
and present merge. If you read a lot of poetry and
mysticism from Rumi to T. S. Eliot, you hear tell of
it—time past is part of time future, and time future
is time past, and time now is encompassing all. The
thin places are real places in the landscape, a matrix
of moments where people find themselves falling
into timelessness or eternity, the world of the
greater mind, the Pleroma, the living collective unconscious;
the world where things outlive the physical.
That’s where the fairies and the banshees and
the leprechauns and the gods all live; however, it’s
not a simple metaphysical suburb. To actually come
upon a vortex in the landscape that can physically
make that happen was exciting to no end. I spent
a whole week traipsing up and down County Mayo
to find a site that felt like that. Lost in the bog and
rain, it seemed hopeless until Anne and Lawrence
Howard—sheep farmers, sculpture aficionados,
and enduring friends—steered me to a remote
peninsula towards sunset one day. Anagh Head, an
exotic rock peninsula, had me in one instant; I knew
it. My legs turned to Jell-O. Something was going on
there. I didn’t know what it was, but I was at ease in
a thin place at last. The same feeling occurred a few
miles away and a few days later at Doonamoe, an
enormous blowhole.
These two design-build expeditions involved
choosing twenty-five students. For a semester we
explored what a thin place is and how could it be
expressed in architectural form—other than two
thin walls that one can’t get through. Then, for two
weeks, we went to the coast of Ireland and actually
built them both simultaneously! We explored the
landscape, and began to realize that where the moss
actually stops growing, where the bog and the rocks
touch, there’s a thing called the Tír Sáile—where
the earth and the salted air meet; in Gaelic, Tír
being the earth, and Sáile being the salted air. Salty
air kills organic matter such as coastal moss; the
moss then dies and new moss grows on top of the
dead on and on for centuries, thus creating a bog,
a bouncy covering two to ten feet thick. It has
covered entire villages, such as the Ceide Fields, for
over 5,500 years. Seamus calls it a slow-motion lava.
Anagh Head is a huge landmass, where the rock
is actually a rocky prow tearing into the ocean,
fighting it constantly. The sea coughs stones and
boulders hundreds of feet in the air back at the
land. So you know you’re not going to build in the
range of fire of the boulders, but right at the line
where the storms can’t reach, right where the rocks
end and the bog begins: there is a thin place. The
wave mass coming from the ocean is two hundred
feet deep. The island of Ireland is thick at the edge.
Deep in nature, booming in your subconscious, you
find the magical thin place of eons of rocking sea
against rock.
On the Anagh Head site we built a hemi-beehive,
a classic way of creating a monk’s retreat in
stone, and then we exploded out to the sea with
accelerating steel arches amplifying the moment you
walked into that little thin place. You are at once
centered and catapulted by the sea’s edge.
The day I got there to explore for sites (a year
before we built the projects), tragically, two local
children drowned at sea. My children were with me,
which amplified the sadness even more. The next
year, when we were building the project, those children’s
families all came along with everybody else
to celebrate its completion. It was an overwhelming
moment of sadness and release. The spirit of the
architecture resonated again. Father Kevin, more
a mystical-environmental Gandalf than a priest,
dedicated the project to those lost at sea.
People came from all over; they came to stand
at a sanctuary outside their churches. For some
it was exhilarating to see the celebrations of the
sea, for others who had lost loved ones, it was a
sad remembrance: the landscape is so much a state
of mind. In combination, sadness and joy shared
a mystical resonance with the sea and the land; a
thin place enveloped them. Sitting there, you engulf
the great sea, submitting to a wondrous sense of
rest and resolution. The back-and-forth motion of
the tides erases time’s slow acceleration into the
eternal rocks.
Top: Travis Price in County Mayo with Peter Hynes,
Architect—Key Maestro for Spirit of Place in Ireland. Photograph
by Jose Benitez. Above: Approaching the Anagh Head
Spirit of Place—The thin place between steel and stone
bog. Photograph by Travis Price. Opposite: 110-foot gorge
at Doonamoe looking over the Irish Sea toward Boston.
Photograph by Kenneth M. Wyner.
“THE EARLY CELTS BELIEVED IN ‘THIN PLACES’: GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATIONS SCATTERED
THROUGHOUT IRELAND AND THE BRITISH ISLES WHERE A PERSON EXPERIENCES ONLY A
VERY THIN DIVIDE BETWEEN PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE TIMES; PLACES WHERE A PERSON IS
SOMEHOW ABLE, POSSIBLY ONLY FOR A MOMENT, TO ENCOUNTER A MORE ANCIENT REALITY
WITHIN PRESENT TIME; OR PLACES WHERE PERHAPS ONLY IN A GLANCE WE ARE SOMEHOW
TRANSPORTED INTO THE FUTURE. SOME OF THE STORIES HERE THAT ASSOCIATE THE SAINTS
WITH INTUITIVE AND PSYCHIC POWERS ATTEST TO THESE ‘THIN PLACES.’”
—EDWARD SELLNER, WISDOM OF THE CELTIC SAINTS
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Epiphany at Lake Ealue:
the Spirit of Place
A
spiritual watershed for me in my professional
and academic life was an epiphany
that came at Lake Ealue in northern British
Columbia, about sixteen years ago. It ultimately
led to the development of a series of design/build
expeditions, thirteen thus far, titled the “Spirit of
Place.” In them I found clarity for the final lens,
Stillness, and coalesced my greater search for the
Mythic Modern.
It was then that I met a genius who has since
become one of my best friends and mentors, Wade
Davis, an anthropologist, writer, and the Explorerin-Residence
at the National Geographic Society.
I had known his wife, Gail Percy, for years. One
evening Wade and I shared dinner at a Japanese
modernist house I had designed in Georgetown
for Catherine Mellon. We talked almost until dawn
about anthropology, mysticism, architecture and the
mysteries of cultures. He said, “You’ve got to come
up and visit my spiritual lair at Lake Ealue so we can
continue this rap. Bring your children as well.” I did.
It changed my life.
Getting there is in itself no simple expedition.
Lake Ealue is about 1,200 miles north of Vancouver,
four or five days up a long logging road. The first
time I went—with my children—we went halfway
by plane, flying over a thousand glaciers or so,
landed, took the luggage out of the aisle with the
pilot helping us, got the only rental vehicle in the
last township before Ealue and headed north 300
more miles. On the drive, I lost a windshield and a
gas tank from rocks; after patching the tank with
liquid filler and filling it up at a gas station for logging
trucks, we arrived by the skin of our teeth at the
middle of nowhere, just short of the Yukon border.
Our first human contact was when Wade
introduced us to Alec Jack, a 98 year old Indian
chief, and his wife, who was 102. He had not seen a
non nomadic person until he was 25. Being around
Wade and Jack was like living in a whole other,
mythological world; to be immersed with ecumenically
minded mates in the wilderness was manna
from heaven. Wade serves it up in quantum gulps.
Up at Ealue, the connections between modern architecture,
nature, and mythology looped back into
my worldview as if being in New Mexico pueblos
fifteen years ago was only fifteen minutes away.
Wade and I became great buddies, because we both
really enjoyed making things, cutting firewood, hiking
and camping, and at the same time having voracious
intellectual discussions about the mythological
world. Wade loved building, but hadn’t delved much
into modern architecture yet, but he smelled delight
in my design flights right away.
There was a pile of about fifty logs sitting
there, which I couldn’t help noticing on the way to
the outhouse and the sauna. I immediately started
building a giant split-pyramid marker, a glorious
processional on the way to the sauna. Glaciers
were all around; the water was freezing. Your balls
retract just staring at the lake, but you go in anyway.
Fishing is resplendent. Your mind is free. You’re
finally disconnected completely. There are no cell
phones, no way out. If you break your leg and it’s
cloudy, which it can be for days, the floatplane can’t
find you. It’s scary, especially when you have kids in
tow, but invigorating, the fresh air that comes with
fear and risk is forever intoxicating. You’re in the
mythical world all the time. You’re around people
that immediately understand what you’re talking
about. In fact, they’re more interested in how you
say your poetry than whether science is alive. The
same is true of their spirits and the landscape. The
native spirits are alive. The gods are now, heaven
is now—it’s not on its way—and spirit worlds are
wide open.
One day Wade and I were just sitting on the
dock, having a beer and catching fish. The conversation
turned to why don’t we do some more of
this Let’s create something up here. The winter
before, their best friend had fallen through the
ice in his traps and died, so they had been somewhat
depressed, not wanting to come back ever
again. But the idea of creative building brought a
breath of oxygen: “Let’s do it” was inescapably
in the air. I thought this also would make a great
course for students at Catholic University’s School
of Architecture (CUArch), where I had taught
design studios and Green architecture classes for
several years. Stanley Hallet, the dean, was joyously
enthusiastic. We would introduce Green design to
cultural metaphors in distant landscapes and teach
students to build with their hands under strenuous
conditions—what better way to teach
Later, Wade gave a talk at Catholic University
in D.C., proposing an expedition to return to Lake
Ealue and create “something.” We thought we’d
get three or four students if we were lucky, but
when Wade gets up on stage, it’s like being at a
mythological rock concert. You come out of there
transformed; he is a genuine shaman. I had a reputation
as the “wild man” practicing architect, which
whetted their appetites as well. What a team we
made. The idea thundered across the entire student
body, and more than 130 students signed up for
the course. It took us longer to figure out how to
diminish the size to a manageable nine than how to
get the whole project designed.
This turned out to be the first of a number
of amazing expeditions, which have gone on for
fourteen years. We’ve gone to Nepal, Peru, Machu
Picchu, Sicily, recently to western Ireland; Mongolia
bodes next. There are billboards now to take you
to our projects, which have become eco tourist
cultural attractions and locations for symposiums.
“Spirit of Place” has transformed into a master’s
degree concentration: the studio is guiding a new
language of architecture pursued in the schools,
finding the mythic and interpreting it into modern
architecture. It is somewhat akin to Sam Mockbee’s
Rural Studio, but on a more global scale.
I had started designing my hypothetical cabin
design during my third year up at Lake Ealue, which
was when the idea of the lenses first jelled. At
that time, I called them “Sunshine, Highways and
Temples.” My intellectual path had finally cleared.
Where I was growing became where I was going.
Stillness, Movement and Nature had been launched.
Above: View from Wade Davis studio to greenhouse
library. Photograph by Kenneth M. Wyner.
Opposite: Lake Ealue, British Columbia.
Photograph by Travis Price.
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“AS LORD VISHNU FLOATS ON A SEA OF SNAKES SEETHING IN TIME’S IMMORTAL PLAY-
ROOM, THE ALL-SEEING GOD PROVOKES US INTO THE MANDALA DANCE OF KNOW-
ING THAT WE DON’T KNOW. EZEKIEL’S VISION OF THE ALL-SEEING EYES OF GOD
ROTATING IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION OF TIME ENVELOPES US IN A PIERCING CLOUD
OF PEACE.
WHEN NEVER ASKED WHAT GOD IS, WE KNOW THE ANSWER; WHENEVER ASKED
WHAT GOD IS, WE DON’T KNOW. WHAT IS THE TEMPTATION OF THOUGHT AND
ITS FIRST IMMERSION IN TIME WHAT IS THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL,
KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING NIRVANA IS A BATH IN THE PEACE OF THE WOMB.
WHILE MYTHS ARE OUR PUBLIC DREAMS, DREAMS ARE OUR PRIVATE MYTHS. FIND
YOUR MYTHS AND DREAMS; THEY WILL TAKE YOU ALONG YOUR TRUTHFUL PATH.
THE GODS ARE WITHIN US; THEY ARE THE GUIDES NOT ONLY FROM THE PAST, BUT
ARE PRESENT IN YOU NOW. WHERE DOES THE FUTURE COME FROM, AND IN WHAT
FORMS DOES IT COME A SNAKE SHEDS ITS SKIN FOR REBIRTH, A LION TRIUMPHS IN
THE SUN, A SNAKE IS OUR PROTECTOR IN THE WOMB. UNDER THE SUN AND THE
MOON, TIME CREATES OPPOSITES, OUT OF THE GARDEN OF OUR INNOCENT UNITY,
KNOWLEDGE BRINGS OPPOSITES AND THE PARADOX OF WISDOM.”
163
– TRAVIS PRICE, NEPAL, 2001
EXPEDITIONS THROUGH THE THREE LENSES
Above: Three Tibetan monks at Boudhanath Temple;
Katamandu, Nepal. Photograph by Chris Rainier.
AOTlayout_part2_gatefolds.indd 162-163
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