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

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

Still here

Sunrise clouds this morning.

Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care

Iris Murdoch, on beauty as an occasion of ‘unselfing,’ The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge, 2013)

Watery thoughts and questions

A pool of light in a dark swamp. (Reflections.)

Water has great generosity and humility. It insists on no particular shape. It takes on the shape of whatever contains it: jug, stream, well, river, lake, ocean, tears, rain, mist or moisture. In this sense water holds a wonderful imaginative invitation in it.

The imagination is always drawn to the hidden form of things. Through its patience it coaxes the form to emerge.

….

… the imagination is a faculty that is oblique and indirect. It works to discover the forms of perception and possibility that we need for our journey. Imagination attends to the great flow of life, and in this way it elicits the form of one’s identity as it emerges from the matrix of one’s experience.

text excerpted from © The Four Elements, John O’Donohue (2010, Transworld Ireland, pp 45-46)