A THEORY OF RELATIVITY

I recently was able to complete a trade for a pot that I had wanted for quite some time and was  exceptionally surprised to get the better end of the deal. Well, let me clarify that, to me, I got the better end of the deal, not necessarily so from the person I traded with who has exactly the same viewpoint regarding what they received. It is somewhat paradoxical that a piece that I so highly regard can be just another "ordinary" pot to another, I guess it is just relative to what you like and respond to for whatever reason. Offered here is a theory of relativity as it applies to "stuff", in the end, we both got exactly what we wanted and in a perfect world, that should always be the outcome. A very similar event happened recently on a Japanese website, a pot that I found incredible (and beyond our price range) was listed and I was sure by the next morning it would be sold, it was not, Morning after morning passed and it was still there, to us very frustrating and as irritating as anything else. It took quite a few months to sell and it just seemed to defy logic how anyone else who would encounter the pot didn't see it exactly as we did. I have long since concluded that perception and experience are as different from individual to individual as is our idiosyncratic genetic profiles.

I know I have touched on this subject before on my blog but simply put, there are times that I am just amazed at the great disparity in how people value things, to me a treasure and to someone else, just another "thing". It is not exactly "one man's treasure is another man's trash", but honestly there is no rational explanation for this phenomena and luckily so. If everyone wanted exactly the same "stuff" it would be very, very difficult and prohibitively expensive for most collectors to collect, I am certain that the needed diversity of interest is exactly what keeps the earth spinning around the sun, so much for Copernicus' theory.

Illustrated is a solitary and noble sunlit Iga vase by Furutani Michio. I had set the vase on a shelf while I was photographing another pot and nature did the rest of the work.

"This perception of division between the seer and the object that is seen, is situated in the mind. For those remaining in the heart, the seer becomes one with the sight."  Ramana Marharsi