You will miss the mundane

 

I can so relate to this excerpt. I am an ardent lover of the mundane, it defines me like nothing else does. 😊 Maybe because I take nothing for granted. Every change of the light is a gift.

Jack Gilbert also expressed it so beautifully, in this poem:

"I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember."

"You'll miss the mundane walk from the post office to the store to the house--the dog greeting you; the neighbors waving; the breeze on your face. You'll miss the slow woman who disrupted your pace.

You won't know this until the walk is difficult or impossible.

There is something to loving the mundane--Thornton Wilder, I believe, dealt with this, to great and roaring cynicism. Be awake and alive and present, because this is your own great and gilded age, and it's going to slip away with brutal swiftness.

People pay small fortunes to see a whale for three seconds or an eagle fly ahead, but they race through their one and only life. I'm fairly positive that I'll regret my stupidity the most in my final moment of awareness."

Alec Guinness, Interview with James Grissom

Gardening

 

For my dear friend Reena, gardener, lover of gardens, creator of beauty

"Indeed, to garden — even merely to be in a garden — is nothing less than a triumph of resistance against the merciless race of modern life, so compulsively focused on productivity at the cost of creativity, of lucidity, of sanity; a reminder that we are creatures enmeshed with the great web of being, in which, as the great naturalist John Muir observed long ago, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe”; a return to what is noblest, which means most natural, in us. 

There is something deeply humanizing in listening to the rustle of a newly leaved tree, in watching a bumblebee romance a blossom, in kneeling onto the carpet of soil to make a hole for a sapling, gently moving a startled earthworm or two out of the way.

Walt Whitman knew this when he weighed what makes life worth living as he convalesced from a paralytic stroke: “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”

Maria Popova

The Healing Power of Gardens: Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature

Photo: Flower of the Cannon Ball Tree, Nagalinga Pushpa. The flowers grow out of the trunk of the tree.

It’s giving, until the giving feels like receiving

 

From 'To Begin With, The Sweetgrass'

Mary Oliver

II

Eat bread and understand comfort.

Drink water, and understand delight.

Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets

are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds

who are drinking the sweetness, who are

thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.

Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.

Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star

both intimate and ultimate,

and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:

oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two

beautiful bodies of your lungs.

III.

The witchery of living

is my whole conversation

with you, my darlings.

All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.

This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.

It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.

It’s more than the beating of the single heart.

It’s praising.

It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.

You have a life—just imagine that!

You have this day, and maybe another, and another.

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage

 

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage.

So I sat still for three days
and God came to me.

Kabir, in 'Love Poems from God, Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West'

Joy is not made to be a crumb

 

Don’t Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.

Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Mary Oliver

Living

What a beautifully written piece! Shared by a dear friend. And it was such a wonderful surprise to see Pico Iyer also in there! I missed Kurosawa's Ikuru - need to find it. 

"Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, has been nominated for the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for Living" - which is based on Kurasowa's "Ikiru". 

"One of the things about the original Japanese film that really appealed to me," he explains, "it emphasizes the fact that you can't rely on the applause of the wider world to tell you whether you've lived well or not. Public acclaim may be nice to have, but ultimately, it's not worth very much. It's treacherous, fickle, it's usually wrong... you've got to take a lonely private view of what is success and failure for you. I think that is what it's saying. You've got to try and find a meaning that's within yourself, and I found that quite inspiring."

How should we be 'Living'? Kurosawa and Ishiguro tackle the question, 70 years apart

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/06/1161482211/kazuo-ishiguro-living-ikiru-oscars

Joy is a function of Focus

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. 

Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. 

If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. 

Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. 

So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem 

“The Weighing”

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

From here thanks to Maria Popova

You must be the thing you see

After the red Gulmohars of summer, the pink/purple/violet Bauhinias are here, announcing August.

To Look at Any Thing

To look at any thing,
If you would know that thing,
You must look at it long:

To look at this green and say,
"I have seen spring in these
Woods," will not do - you must
Be the thing you see:

You must be the dark snakes of
Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,
You must enter in
To the small silences between
The leaves,

You must take your time
And touch the very peace
They issue from.

John Moffitt

I must be the sun

Solar

On a gray day, when the sun
has been abducted, and it’s chill
end-of-the-world weather,
I must be the sun.

I must be the one
to encourage the young
sidetracked physicist
working his father’s cash register
to come up with a law of nature
that says brain waves can change
the dismal sky.  I must be the one

to remind the ginger plant
not to rest on the reputation
of its pungent roots, but to unveil
those buttery tendrils from the other world.

When the sky is an iron lid
I must be the one to simmer
in the piquant juices of possibility,
though the ingredients are unknown
and the day begins with a yawn.

I must issue forth a warmth
without discrimination, and any guarantee
it will come back to me.

On a dark day I must be willing
to keep my disposition light,
I have to be at the very least
one stray intact ray
of local energy, one small
but critical fraction
of illumination.  Even on a day

that doesn’t look gray
but still lacks comfort or sense,
I have to be the sun,
I have to shine as if
sorry life itself depended on it.

I have to make all the difference.

Thomas Centolella

Views from along the Middle Way (yet to read)

Gratitude arises from paying attention

Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life

....Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s strange world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege.

Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets and fully beholds all other presences. Being unappreciative, feeling distant, might mean we are simply not paying attention.

© 2015 David Whyte, from ‘Gratitude’

In Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

Photo: My Java Olive tree baby opening its eyes - pure magic! :) 

Was there magic, and did you stop for it?

"At the end of a day, I tend to ask myself, did you contribute something beautiful to the world? Just a little beauty. And, did you live strongly and quietly today? Was there magic, and did you stop for it? Did you attend?"

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/snow

Teaching oneself joy, over and over again

Barbara Kingsolver was introduced to me by a random foreigner who saw me at a flea market sale and ordered me, "You MUST read this!" ('The Poisonwood Bible'). I am always moved by people who take that effort to make my experience of life a little deeper, whether or not they know me - hey, don't we share the same planet, what introductions are we waiting for? - :) - so I bought it. And was completely blown away! Kingsolver is an amazing writer.

I can so relate to this passage, it's something I do. :) On my worst days, I go out early in the morning, bruised, hollow, empty - and look at every fallen leaf and flower, every spot of colour along my way, every squirrel going crazy at the return of the light ("Oh my God, it's back!"), and allow them to fill me, one by one.

“In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again.

Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.”

Barbara Kingsolver from 'High Tide in Tucson'

From here: http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/geranium

Our every day life is what will save us

"Adams raises the questions, “Is art a sufficient consolation for life? Can Beauty make suffering tolerable?” His answer, while not an all-out endorsement for art, is real, and tangible. He says: “The fact is, I think that they are only partly sufficient. If we are not too burdened by disappointment or loneliness or pain, there are certainly times when art can help; there are moments when great pictures can heal. Views by Masaccio and Rembrandt and Cezanne and Stieglitz, among others, have all been important to me in this way.”

He goes on to say:

“Sometimes it has been enough to search out a cafe blessed with a jukebox, rattling dishes, and human voices. Family and friends are better though. What a relief there is in an anecdote, a jumping dog, or the brush of a hand. All of these things are disorderly, but no plan for survival stands a chance without them.”

Our every day life is what will save us, perhaps, in the end. The beauty of that, whether it's captured in a photograph, or in a poem, or paragraph."

Shawna Lemay

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/beautyinphotography

Tipping ourselves over

"Ray Bradbury has said, “We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

Your Turn: http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/dkp3wn35k9tcyhgwep9x9f7fmt4fwn

The lines in the picture are from Mary Oliver's 'Devotions'

Ichigo Ichie: One opportunity, one encounter

"Ichigo Ichie literally means “one opportunity, one encounter.” The terms is often translated as “for this time only,” “never again,” or “one chance in a life time.”

Its better translation may be “Treasure every encounter, for it will never recur.”

The term is derived from Zen Buddhism and concepts of transience, and it is particularly associated with the Japanese tea ceremony and it is often brushed onto scrolls which are hung in the tea room. In the context of tea ceremony, ichigo ichie reminds participants that each single tea meeting is unique that will never recur in one’s lifetime, therefore, each moment should be treated with the utmost sincerity.

It can be applied to one’s daily life, “all we have is today, so let’s live it to the fullest.”

From here: http://calmthings.blogspot.in/2015/03/did-you-hear-that-winters-over.html

Love Letters

Love Letters

Every day, priests minutely examine the Law
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.

Before doing that, though, they should learn
How to read the love letters sent by the wind
and rain, the snow and moon.

Ikkyu, 'Ikkyu and the Crazy Cloud Anthology', trans. by Sonya Arutzen

Miracle

Listen. Put on lightbreak.
Waken into miracle.

W. S. Graham

A tree stands there

"Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one.

A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling.

No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air."

Annie Dillard

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/gjxphz9aa362sj5psh3jw2dzl36egd

But everything glorious is around us already

All That Is Glorious Around Us

is not, for me, these grand vistas, sublime peaks, mist-filled
overlooks, towering clouds, but doing errands on a day
of driving rain, staying dry inside the silver skin of the car,
160,000 miles, still running just fine. Or later,

sitting in a café warmed by the steam
from white chicken chili, two cups of dark coffee,
watching the red and gold leaves race down the street,
confetti from autumn's bright parade. And I think

of how my mother struggles to breathe, how few good days
she has now, how we never think about the glories
of breath, oxygen cascading down our throats to the lungs,
simple as the journey of water over a rock. It is the nature

of stone / to be satisfied / writes Mary Oliver, It is the nature
of water / to want to be somewhere else, rushing down
a rocky tor or high escarpment, the panoramic landscape
boundless behind it. But everything glorious is around

us already: black and blue graffiti shining in the rain's
bright glaze, the small rainbows of oil on the pavement,
where the last car to park has left its mark on the glistening
street, this radiant world.

Barbara Crooker

Shine

One Brilliance

frost in the dried weeds—
sometimes it takes the cold
for things to find their shine.

Rosemerry Trommer