Tag: impermanence

The imperfect

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A Japanese tea bowl, irregular in shape and glazed in earthy tones, may at first glance seem crude compared to the precision of fine porcelain. Yet its roughness is deliberate – an aesthetic choice that honors the handmade, the asymmetrical, and the imperfect. It invites us to appreciate the beauty of the unrefined, the incomplete, and the transient.

Western art has often pursued an ideal of flawless execution, but this can leave us feeling inadequate in the face of our own imperfections. By contrast, the Wabi-Sabi tradition reminds us that there is profound beauty in the marks of wear, the uneven edge, the faded color – signs that an object has lived, been used, and borne witness to time.

Alain de Botton and John Armstrong,  Art as Therapy

Fluid

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The wish to know oneself is often a wish for certainty, for a fixed identity.

But the self is more like a conversation than a monument -shifting, contradictory, and alive in ways we can’t always grasp.

Adam Phillips, Monogamy

Not personal

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When you stop taking experience personally,

the whole drama of ‘I, me, mine’ unravels.

What remains is just life, happening.

Andrew Olendzki, The Buddha’s Medicine

Sunday Quote: being content

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Contentment is the crown of the spiritual life.

It’s not about having what you want but wanting what you have.

Ajahn Amaro, from a 2015 talk

The next branch

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Birds don’t carry their perch with them – they trust the next branch will appear.

So often, we exhaust ourselves clinging to what’s familiar, afraid to fly without guarantees.

But life, like the sky, is always changing. Trust the next branch.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

It flows

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We spend so much of our lives trying to figure things out, to nail down the truth, to be certain. But what if the deepest truth is found not in knowing, but in surrendering to the vastness of not knowing?

In Zen practice, we sit with the question, with the breath, with the moment – without an agenda. This is not a passive resignation but an active engagement with life as it is, free from the filters of our assumptions. When we let go of the need to know, we open ourselves to a reality that is alive, immediate, and infinitely creative.

Not knowing is not ignorance. It is the willingness to meet each experience with fresh eyes, to admit that our thoughts and beliefs are provisional, and to rest in the mystery of being. This takes courage.

But here’s the secret: When we stop clinging to what we think we know, we discover a freedom that was always here. The bird doesn’t need to know how to fly; it flies. The river doesn’t need to know how to flow; it flows. Can you let yourself be like that?

Melissa Blacker in The Book of Not Knowing