the cliched yet beautiful rose...

Everything is dying. The phenomenal world resists all our doomed efforts to arrest transience. We humans seem to have designated a few examples of this fact as beautiful: the cherry blossoms that fall almost as soon as they bloom; the brief display of blazing autumn leaves; the bubbles we blew as children, those iridescent spheres that vanished as they floated by. Sunsets transfix us, seem to soothe us with their undeniable evening truth: finished, over, changing into something else. This ‘defeat’ awakens us to the inherent beauty of what cannot be fixed in time. So what might happen if we stepped more fully beyond the bounds of conventional aesthetics? We would see the loveliness of a cracked china teapot, a pile of rusty keys, a broken rocking chair which resists the glue needed to repair it. What if we left the flowers to shrivel in the vase, allowed the peeling paint of a front door to reveal its layers of color, right down to bare wood? What if we loooked in the mirror & appreciated the scar, the asymmetry, the wrinkles & grey hair, the age spots & the sagging skin? What if we lived with a wilderness mind, in which change is the only constant, & the process of decay is recognized as beautiful? Most of us have grown up in a culture devoted to the habits that blind us. We resist, replace, disguise, crave, acquire, hoard, defend against, & throw away. Rather, it is the turning toward, rather than away from, impermanence that relieves us of the burden of our futile attachments & makes a humbled love possible. We become available to the beauty of the moment as it is, & available to one another as we are. What we deemed plain, damaged, or worn out reveals its preciousness…..Joyce Kornblatt

yes, beauty & brokeness entwined in woundedness, shifting a tender aesthetic sensibility toward profound healing…

may we ease up on ourselves & each other….inclusive, open, rebels for the unbeautiful…present, authentic, & courageously sensitive…

love your old house, old jeans, old face, old fears…

ring the bells that still can ring.

forget your perfect offering.

there is a crack in everything.

that’s how the light gets in.

….Leonard Cohen…

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