Springtime musings

Beauty and grace.

So many beings in the universe love us unconditionally.  A bird song can express joy, beauty, and purity, and evoke in us vitality and love. The trees, the water, and the air don’t ask anything of us; they just love us. Even though we need this kind of love, we continue to destroy these things. We should try our best to do the least harm to all living creatures.

We humans think we’re intelligent, but an orchid, for example, knows how to produce symmetrical flowers; a snail knows how to make a beautiful, well-proportioned shell. Compared with their knowledge, ours is not worth much at all. We should bow deeply before the orchid and the snail and join our palms reverently before the butterfly and the magnolia tree. The feeling of respect for all species will help us to recognize and cultivate the noblest nature in ourselves.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The World We Have

A Monday meander: The greening

So pretty in pink.

I am thinking about time in both directions now — not just a future that will roll on without me, and without so many of the creatures I love, but a past I was not alive to remember.  I think about the American chestnuts, today so rare that their locations are often closely kept secrets among researchers trying to understand why this scant handful survived.  All the vanishing plants and creatures I love so dearly are, I know, only the barest remnant of the abundance this landscape once sustained.  There were twice as many songbirds the year I was born as there are now, and even that teeming number is paltry by comparison to those who lived when chestnuts reigned over the eastern forests.

… The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty.  Throats will always catch when the fleeing clouds part fleetingly and the golden moon flashes into existence and then winks out again.  Tears will always spring up at the wood thrush singing through the echoing trees, at the wild geese crying as they fly.  A soul touched by the scent of turned soil or sun-warmed grass, a spirit moved by crickets singing in the grass, will spend a lifetime surrounded by wonder even as songbirds drop one by one from the poisoned sky and crickets fall silent in the poisoned grass.

Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong.  The tragedy is not the failed world’s barren ugliness.  The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails.  Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world.

~ Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

Because

Me and my solar eclipse shadows.

A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.
― Coco Chanel

Of flowers and goddesses

A small offering.

“The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is – the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.

If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies, and we will lover her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds.”

― Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

Another month rolls by

From the past (and a glimpse of the future).

“When we dance the earth trembles. When our steps fall on the earth we feel the shudder of life beneath us, and the earth feels the beating of our hearts, and we become one with the earth. We shall not sever ourselves from the earth. We must chant our being, and we must dance in time with the rhythms of the earth. We must keep the earth.”

― N. Scott Momaday, Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land

A Monday meander: In my art studio

Beginning with a circle

Remember who you were before the world told you who to be.

– Charles Bukowski

Oscar Wilde said that some things are too important to be taken seriously. Art is one of those things. Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you to play, explore, and test without attachment to results.

― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being