Abundance

"He was obedient to and at one with nature and the four seasons."
— Basho on Saigyo, quoted in Sam Hamill, introduction to 'Narrow Road to the Interior'

February. People falling ill, cancer striking closer and closer, bad news all around, a lot of time spent in hospitals, and more to come.

Meanwhile....

The rain trees are bare, the new leaves budding like hope at their fingertips. Against the sky, delicate filigree silhouettes, their branches flowing out like water frozen in motion. And on the ground, beautiful intricate shadows - the earth, and the sky, everything a canvas.

The Hongai leaves have turned golden, some trees have shed, others already shining in the sun, resplendent, their small translucent oily leaves as stunning as flowers, green and red.

The mahogany leaves are falling, their seed pods breaking to release the twirling twirling winged brown seeds scattered on our streets.

The yellow tabebuias have started blooming, quietly, quietly, filling up the bare branches, until one fine day they stop you in your tracks.

The pink tabebuias, slightly early, blooming on some streets already in bunches of ethereal softness.

The trees full of birds building nests, so that their babies are born in summer, rich with ripe fruits and insects.

The white-cheeked barbets can be heard loud and clear above the chattering parakeets this season.

The wind, that has come to help shake the dry leaves off the trees, ringing my chimes all day, ringing in peace.

And the migratory rosy starlings back at my window, chirping away in large flocks, adding their music to my mornings, and flying up in murmurations once in a while. They are early this year, but well, I am not complaining. :)

The universe throws beauty at us, lavishly, a thousand pearls of abundance, whatever is going on in our lives.

Oh, not to be swine, but to be grateful....to take what is offered so generously, and to be glad, and to be consoled, even for a while.


Light, Light: https://goo.gl/photos/Gmyeqsict4sbMiro8

Astonishment: https://goo.gl/photos/jTfQLRZN7WewQGvA7

Hongai: https://goo.gl/photos/Kh7narkor7KcgXGS8
 

Eating Sun

And then there is the realization that perhaps all your life has just been a polishing of the lens, a passage through large patches of darkness so that you learn that the light of the most mundane of days is the biggest gift of all, and that anything bigger than that is to be received kneeling down, like bread and wine, His body and blood ......

“This light was not like the flow of water, but something more fleeting and numberless, for its source was everywhere. I liked seeing that the light came from nowhere in particular, but was an element just like air...Radiance multiplied, reflected itself from one window to the next, from a fragment of wall to cloud above. It entered into me, became part of me.

I was eating sun.”

'And There was Light' , Jacques Lusseyran, a French writer who went blind at the age of eight and later survived the Buchenwald concentration camp

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/lightisalive