It is blossom season in Japan and in gardens here. They are often used as a metaphor for human existence – beautiful but short lived – a reminder that life needs to be celebrated yet always contains an element of impermanence.
You ask me why I dwell in these green mountains;
I smile and am silent, for my heart is free of care.
As the peach-blossom flows down the stream and goes into the unknown,
I live in a world apart that is not of men.
Li Po, 701-762, Green Mountain
Our life journey contain many twists and turns and we all make mistakes along the way. And yet, Spring returns
I write,
erase,
rewrite.
Erase again, and then…
A poppy blooms.
Hokusai, 1760 – 1849, Japanese painter, printmaker
It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly.
That again is part of this paradox.
You cannot rip away caterpillarness.
The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.
Ram Dass
Today is Candlemas in the Christian tradition, the lighting of candles to look towards the end of winter, layered on the earlier Celtic feast of Imbolc.
Beauty changes; it’s not static. The seasons change. All the leaves fall off the trees, all the flowers disappear. Everything becomes bleak in winter when there is hardly any noticeable contrast, except in shades of dark and light. Now we might say that spring is more beautiful than winter, if we prefer vibrant colors, beautiful flowers, an the kind of energy that spring brings. But if we open our minds, we also begin to recognize the subtle beauty of winter. We can appreciate the lack of color and silence of winter as much as the energy of spring.
This appreciation comes from not having opinions about things being perfect in a static way. It comes from seeing that the rose is a perfect rose in spring, summer, autumn and winter. For static perfection, you need a plastic rose, but that’s never as satisfying.
Ajahn Sumedho, The Mind and the Way
The first day of Spring in the older Celtic tradition
By gently letting go of everything – not through force, not by slaying it, but simply seeing all the content as a passing show, as process and flow – we become the whole of our experience and open to our natural understanding.
If fear or wanting arises, it is seen within the spaciousness that surrounds it. We don’t get lost by becoming it, but simply see it as just another moment in the mind flow, another something which arose uninvited and will pass away in the same manner.
Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening
Very unlike the mild winter we are having here in Ireland, but a mind that is perfect for meditation
One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice, the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun;
and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land
full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place
for the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens
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