This Is Not a ...

When I was at US Festival this year, I woke up thinking about that Magritte painting known as "This Is Not a Pipe" in English, which includes its caption as part of the picture. When it is pointed out, we think, "Of course, it's not a pipe - it's a painting of a pipe."
Most Magritte works I know of play with appearances.

But that image does remind me of the assumptions I make.

Do we have that recognition of the ultimate nature of the things we see or perceive?
I decided to take that painting as a teaching on emptiness, trying to recognize every form I saw as a hallucination: This is not a pipe, it is an illusion of a pipe; this is not a park, it's a hallucination of a park, etc. I find that a new and fun way to remind myself of emptiness as I go through my day.

This weekend, at the Northwest Dharma Celebration with Gen Rigpa, he used the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle, where KMC Washington is, as an example of emptiness, by asking, "Where is Ballard?" Which worked really well for me, in part because people have different ideas of its size: for example is the Sunset Hill area a sub-neighborhood of Ballard or a stand-alone neighborhood?
Also, driving around Ballard, you'll see cars with a "Free Ballard" bumper-sticker, because Ballard used to be its own town, before being annexed by Seattle. Ballard's character has also changed a lot from those days. When I arrived in Seattle 20+ years ago, Ballard was known as a place of Scandinavians and seniors. They don't recognize it anymore: That's not the Ballard I know. Now it's getting tall buildings with expensive rents. With all the construction, it's become prohibitively expensive for many current and would-be residents.
Where does Ballard end and Fremont to the SE begin? I remember when we were looking to buy a house, and the fuzzy area in between those two had nicknames like Fre-lard.
Rigpa also noted that some people would point to a place on a map, but he said, "That's not Ballard - it's a map of Ballard!"