Wabi-Sabi

“When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.”

~Barbara Bloom

(via crashinglybeautiful)

Unsettling the Anthrocosm

The invisible past has something to teach us about our infinite present.  It is always to be considered.

~ü

s33:

Having looked at the limitations of our senses and intuition to perceive reality, and the limitations of science’s maths and models to make sense of our experience, the territory that remains open is the universe of human meaning.

It’s a great privilege to have access to both ancient (or timeless) wisdom and modern knowledge but the sense of either of them, even overlapping, seem to leave a bit of an ozone hole right where we live. 

2007.IV.

In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past. When
we say, “This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water,” it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said “now,” it was gone.

If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of the measurers we don’t
exist at all, which seems
improbable, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know.

You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and alive, causing the heart
to sway in the rift between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own. This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.

Is it concentration of the mind,
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?
In time we are present only
by forgetting time.

―Wendell Berry