stories, art and faith.
My grandmother, a rosary, and time standing still One of my childhood memories is of my grandmother and her sister praying the rosary together every afternoon. They would sit side by side and repeat the prayers, following the rhythm of the beads. Back then, I didn’t fully understand the meaning ...
I bought this painting on vicuña hide in Cusco. It represents Pachamama, Mother Earth, one of the most profound figures in the Andean religious universe. When the Spanish arrived in the Andes, they found peoples who had spent centuries trying to answer the same questions that human beings had asked ...
AMULETS: CARRYING THE SACRED WITH US I found these small amulets in China. The first two came from a night market in Beijing; the third, from the Taoist mountains of Yunnan. Sacred images designed to be worn close to the body: gods, protectors and masters who leave the temple to ...
VISHNU: THE GOD WHO TRIES TO PRESERVE THE WORLD I traveled to India twice. On one of those trips, I crossed practically the entire north of the country, from the border with Pakistan to Calcutta, catching endless train rides and watching the landscape, the cities, and the people change before ...
BEFORE THE GODS HAD FACES In this post I want to talk about the ancestral religions, the oldest and most primitive ways of relating to the sacred. A time in which the world seemed to be full of invisible forces and in which spirituality was often expressed through geometric figures, ...
BUDDHA. FROM MAN TO GOD When we travel through Asia we find Buddha images everywhere. Some are austere and almost naked. Others are surrounded by gods, demons, bodhisattvas, and supernatural worlds. And I have always been fascinated by the same question: How could the same figure change so much? In ...