The Wren

the little wren had some how found it's way into my house
it would fly in a half circle and then slam (as muck as a wren can slam) into the window trying to get out
i pulled the curtains over the window, the wren just went to another window
i opened the doors, but for some reason it would not go near them
the wren hit the window again and again, finally it was stunned and sat on the sill
i cupped the wren in my hands a softly as i could
and returned it the great outdoors, to the branches of the lavender bush
the wren stayed there for what seemed like a long time till it flitted away

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Chinese New Year

Yesterday I was down in the International District to pick up lunch at my favorite Vietnamese Restaurant. While I was inside I started to hear Firecrackers, thousands of them going off outside. Well I had forgotten it was New Years and they were celebrating, they had Dancing Dragons, live music and the fireworks.

Shifting

The ordinary mind is the ceaselessly shifting and shiftless prey of external influences, habitual tendencies, and conditioning; the masters liken it to a candle flame in an open doorway, vulnerable to all the winds of circumstance.

Sogyal Rinpoche

Imperfection

These quotes are all from A. Juniper's book " wabi sabi, the japanese art of imperfection"

"Wabi Sabi embodies the Zen nihilist cosmic view and seeks beauty in the imperfection found in all things, in a constant state of flux, evolve from nothing and devolve back to nothing. Within this perpetual movement nature leaves arbitrary tracks for us to contemplate, and it is these random flaws and irregularities that offer a model for the modest and humble wabi sabi expression of beauty."

Focusing on the natural, the impermanent, and the humble, and in these simple and often rustic objects they discovered the innate beauty to be found in the exquisite random patterns left by the flow of nature. The small nuances of color, the curve of an opening petal, the crack in a bamboo vase, or the decay of a knot in old timber. This came to symbolize mujo, which is the Buddhist tenet of impermanence and continuous flux.

The core philosophy that beauty was to be found in the details.

The Japanese attention to detail and their desire to keep all aspects of design as simple and well balanced as possible…..

With the Zen belief of greatness in the smallest things, immense emphasis was put on all small details of life, and with the attention to detail came care, and with the care came the meditative qualities of the tea ceremony.

Translation
The Japanese love ambiguity, and in literature the writer will aim to maximize the potential meaning of his prose by deliberately leaving out subjects and objects, thuse increasing the scope of interpretation.

While Asians tend to prefer intuition and emotion-based decision making, there is in the West an underlying preference for clarity and logic that goes hand in hand with the deference for science. In negotiations between the two, such differences often lead to misunderstandings.

What is Beauty?
Beauty is probably best defined as the aesthetic pleasure gained from perceiving something that one believes to be physically attractive. That the rough, asymmetric, and modest objects of Wabi Sabi are considered by some to be the essence of beauty illustrates that a rational or objective approach to understanding beauty will probably yield little.

Philosophy
The philosophy of Wabi Sabi stresses that it is not through material possessions and worldly attachments that we will be able to find the peace that we seek. Instead of demanding consumer goods, so many of which are designed to become obsolete in order to perpetuate sales, we might choose to only buy what we really need for a fulfilling life.

Live more, buy less.

“Attach your lives to a goal not people or things” - Albert Einstein

Snow Crow

Dust Of Snow
Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued

Raven tracks in Sand

wPict17th
Originally uploaded by Au_Kalan.

Beach Leaf, Orcas Island