Guess what Dallas has?

Look familiar?

( Cut for bandwidth )

I spent the afternoon at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art. It was a wonderful afternoon.

Walking through the Dallas Museum of Art, I was overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude for all the experiences I've had over the last four years. After blitzing through the contemporary art exhibit I checked out their Ancient Mediterranean collection, whose sarcophagi couldn't hold a candle up to those I saw two weeks ago in Istanbul, and their Egyptian collection, which is falling over itself in excitement that it will soon be hosting the Tutankhamun exhibit I saw in Cairo.

Then I headed up to the Asian collection, where I was greeted by a very familiar statue of Varuna, a Shivalingam, an Ardhanarishwara and a Shiva Nataraja, Buddhas in various familiar mudras -- even a statue from a temple I've visited in Khajuraho. Last time I visited an Asian art collection in the States, these things all seemed very foreign and inscrutable. Now I know how to tell Hindu gods apart by their weapons and symbols; I know what the different mudras of the Buddha mean; I recognize all the incarnations of Vishnu. The once-exotic felt very familiar and comforting.

Standing in the museum, I suddenly felt that I could keel over dead at that moment and have no regrets. I've been so awesomely fortunate, to be able to travel so much and learn so much about so many different places and cultures. My life is infinitely cooler than I could ever have planned it to be, if life were capable of being planned.

And, lest it sound like I am turning my nose up at the Dallas museums, they were really quite good. At the museum of art I was particularly fond of a stunning Meiji-era bronze sculpture called "Takenouchi no Sukune Meets the Dragon King of the Sea." This picture is better than mine, but really, photos don't get across the magnificent detail of this piece; it's probably one of the most impressive pieces of art I've ever seen. At the Nasher, I loved James Turrell's "Tending (Blue)" and Max Ernst's "King Playing with the Queen," and the Crow Collection had this amazing display of 19th century Chinese snuff bottles, which they painted in intricate detail from inside the bottle. It certainly puts ships in bottles to shame, that's for sure.