Skip to main content

compassion

This is one of my favorite photos.  A heart shaped leaf caught up in the skeletal arms of a blossom gone by.  I look at this photo often, trying to understand what about it has won my favor.  Perhaps it is the beauty of transience.  A reminder that even in death there is unspeakable splendor to be found and experienced.  After rereading the recent poem post and the posts preceding, I had to chuckle.  How interesting to dedicate a year to happiness in one post and devote the following post to sadness.  It is perfect really.  The humor in it begs clarification for my dedication and apparent inconsistencies.  I don't consider happiness separate from sorrow, rather I think happiness may only be found in the peaceful acceptance of the "is-ness" of life.  Devoid of my beliefs and concepts of what life is, or should be, or could be, what is there.  When sadness arises in the "is-ness" of life, or "happiness" arises, wouldn't it be lovely to witness beauty within the transience.  Like a dried leaf caught in the arms of a dying bloom, a spaciousness of experience...an invitation for compassion.

Comments

Rose Turner said…
This photo is fantastic!
Small or large scale, this is a work of art. Thank you for sharing.
January 24, 2011 at 8:30 PM
Wind said…
It is your heart and the deep expression of it's voice that is the truest work of art.
January 24, 2011 at 11:24 PM
Traci Hendrix Hart said…
Gorgeous, thought provoking, and peaceful. Your words, your images, and YOU.
Thank you for the brain and spirit food!...
January 25, 2011 at 10:57 AM
china cat said…
or perhaps to look at "sadness" without getting sad about it - what does it really look like? I am always swept away before I ever had time to investigate... miss you and am thinking of you often. As a side note, Mina deals with sadness by bending forward, laying the top of her head on the floor, letting out a good scream and then walking away.
January 25, 2011 at 9:12 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much.  It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall.  The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep.  But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy.  I am a woman who loves the spring.  I nearly live for it.  When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis.  I gorge.  This year has been hard.  Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally.  The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...
2 comments
Read more

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment.  It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float.  It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within.  It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains.  Eyes closed.  Eyes opened.  A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being.  It takes courage.
4 comments
Read more

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...
4 comments
Read more