hey! theres another great sunset! go look! Sunsets transfix us, seem to soothe us with their undeniable evening truth: finished, over, changing into something else. These fadings can’t be doctored, and 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 rocking chair—like the one I have—whose broken rocker resists the glue with which I keep trying 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 looked in the mirror and appreciated the scar, the asymmetry, the wrinkles and gray hair, the age spots and the sagging skin? What if we lived with a wilderness mind, in which change is the only constant, and the process of decay is recognized as beautiful? . . . It is this turning toward, rather than away from, impermanence that relieves us of the burden of our futile attachments and makes a humbled love possible. We become available to the beauty of the moment as it is, and available to one another as we are. -Joyce Kornblatt, exploring the intersection of beauty, transience, and imperfection in This Ruined House, from our Winter 2010 issue of Parabola, Beauty. Read the full issue: bit.ly/1Ed9iPM
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 22:19:29 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015