Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides   
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you   
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.


The beautiful changes as a forest is changed   
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;   
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves   
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   
In such kind ways,   
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
~Richard Wilbur “The Beautiful Changes”

I am changed again, as I blend into autumn.

We can’t help but be transformed by everything around us, you know.

Beautiful is the dying meadow, the shedding of dry reddened leaves,
the tidal wave of wildflowers nodding goodbye until next summer.

Beauty is beheld with wonder and then lost to the ages. We cannot change what we see, but treasure its transience, as we cherish our own brief moments here.

We hold on lightly, ready to let go when the time comes.
What comes next is beautiful beyond imagining.

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What Remains of My Day

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What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it…

For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day.

After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
~Kazuo Ishiguro from The Remains of the Day

 

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To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out:
“I am an evening cloud too.”
They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me.
Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings.
That is how evening clouds greet each other.
They had recognized me.

― Rainer Maria RilkeStories of God

 

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During the quiet moments in the evening after we ascend the hill to watch the sun descend the sky, we see clouds move and change in the diminishing light.  They’re unable to remain the same as they are pushed across the horizon, constantly reinvented and renewed, adopting new shapes, new colors, new juxtapositions.

Even when I believe things will never change, they will,  and I will.  What is left of the remains of the day may be the best yet.

If I stop, watch and listen, I’ll soon hear that greeting of recognition.

 

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