. . . Saints preserve us . . .

In Tew's mailbox this morning. . .

Today is the 508th anniversary of the birth of St. Teresa of Ávila. She was born on this date in 1515 Gotarrendura, Spain. Among her several books, The Interior Castle has been translated many times over 400 years. Mirabai Starr's interpretive translation (2004) is being recognized as extraordinarily accessible for contemporary spiritual seekers.

The path does not have to be labeled as spiritual. It is just a simple journey, the journey that contains exchange with the reality of this and that—or with the unreality of it, if you prefer. Relating with these exchanges—the living process, the being process—is the path. – Chögyam Trungpa

Grace emerges in the ebb and flow, not just the flow. The waning reveals a different kind of blessing than the waxing. – Rob Brezsney.

Willing to experience aloneness,

I discover connection everywhere;

. . .

Surrendering into emptiness,

I find fullness without end.

. . .

I bow to the one who has made it so,

Who has crafted this Master Game;

To play it is pure delight,

To honor it is true devotion.

– by Jennifer Welwood

Wabi Sabi

In the mailbox this Moon-day morning . . .

Yesterday was the 149th anniversary of Robert Frost's birth. He was born in 1874 San Francisco; it was also Tennessee Williams birth date, in 1911 Columbus, Mississippi; and F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel, This Side of Paradise, was published yesterday in 1920.

Wabi sabi is a Japanese term that, unlike the contemporary ideal of smooth, streamlined, futuristic creations, value the organic, imperfect, faded nature of earthy things – handmade one at a time, not mass produced, and all the more appealing when worn through loving use. Wabi sabi relies on intuitive, right-here right-now observation, without any glance toward the future or even the idea of progress. A pastoral aesthetic, wabi sabi not only accepts nature as unruly and uncontrollable, it welcomes nature’s rule, beyond the scope of any technology we can create, however sleek and obedient. So, wabi sabi embraces the idea of corrosion, decay to the point of disintegration, and ambiguity, in warm fluid shapes and quietly resonating earth tones. Crack-lines on your coffee cup. Poetry, too, can be wabi sabi, if it arouses an acceptance of reality at its most exquisitely mundane, in which things and people break down, but are no less beautiful for that. . .We can’t enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention. . .[R]relish life’s sensory festival. Everything that happens to us – from choosing the day’s shoes to warfare – shines at the depot where nature and human nature meet. . .and the day begins. – Diane Ackerman

Strangers

is a word derived from the othering

we were taught. Children do not know

othering.

Everyone is a friend not yet met.

The asshats we meet are not

strangers, but friends

practicing ignorance.

3.27.23 jb

Doing what we do . . .

In the mailbox this 26th day of 2023 March . . . a ray of light from unimaginably far away . . .

The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. – Elizabeth Gilbert

A.I. will do what it does, just as the automobile replaced the horse and buggy, but we artists will do what we do, which is to readjust and find new ways to lay claim to our humanity. On the margins, where art lives, humans will continue to carve and paint and hear voices and daydream, pulling out of unique lives unique work — just as this morning, as I finish writing this, I prepare to go down into my office and work on my cat story, examining my scenes, rewriting sentences and trying to see what I’m doing, aware that the world has not yet seen what I’m creating, which no A.I. can replicate because, right now, as I sit here, as far as the world is concerned, it does not exist. – David Means

We learn, as we say, by “trial and error.” Why do we always say that? Why not “trial and rightness” or “trial and triumph”? The old phrase puts it that way because that is, in real life, the way it is done . . . Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We are built to make mistakes, coded for error. . .hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency toward error. The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments. . . – Lewis Thomas in Maria Popova's current issue of The Marginalian

Also see Maria at TED on humanity’s search for cosmic truth and poetic beauty.