Impermanence and beauty

It’s true, I think, as Kenko says in his Idleness,
That all beauty depends upon disappearance,
The bitten edges of things,
the gradual sliding away
Into tissue and memory,
the uncertainty
And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from,
And their frayed loveliness.

Charles Wright, American poet, 1935 – , Lonesome Pine Special

(Kenko, 1284 – 1350, Buddhist monk, author of Essays in Idleness)

Make something beautiful

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Mary Oliver, Franz Marc’s Blue Horses

Stilling the mind’s questions

I do not know what gorgeous thing
the bluebird keeps saying,
his voice easing out of his throat,
beak, body into the pink air
of the early morning. I like it
whatever it is. Sometimes
it seems the only thing in the world
that is without dark thoughts.
Sometimes it seems the only thing
in the world that is without
questions that can’t and probably
never will be answered, the
only thing that is entirely content
with the pink, then clear white
morning and, gratefully, says so.

Mary Oliver, What Gorgeous Thing

In the present

Move through life living from one moment to the other,

wholly absorbed in the present,

carrying with you so little from the past that your spirit could pass through the eye of a needle;

as little distracted by the worries of the future as the birds of the air and the flowers of the field.

Anthony de Mello

The rarest wildflowers

I dream of a quiet man
who explains nothing and defends 
nothing, but only knows 
where the rarest wildflowers 
are blooming, and who goes, 
and finds that he is smiling 
not by his own will.

Wendell Berry,  from Given

Content in all seasons

If there are mountains, I look at the mountains;
On days it is raining, I listen to the rain.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter.
Tomorrow too will be good.
Tonight too will be good.

Santoka, Japanese author and haiku poet, 1882 -1940