Month: April 2006

Flowers are not boring

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In the world of marketing and cool stuff we live in, people and things can become hugely popular in a moment and then be rapidly forgotten. We buy stuff, and then we buy more stuff, and almost everything we buy breaks fast to leave space to the new and improved, version 2.0, turbo model of the same crap. We work too much to earn money that we spend to buy more and more stuff (unless we don’t have enough for the essential things, in which case we work too much just to survive; but where is the boundary between essential and non-essential in a world where appearance and social acceptance are essential part of our success?).

ToweringWe live in a world of marketing impermanence.

Every spring, I look at the flowers and I am amazed. Every year they look the same but they are so beautiful, one can never get tired of them. They show up for a little while, then they disappear, leaving us craving for more, and every year they come back.

Flowers are perfect, short living, fragrant, elegantly dressed up in beautiful outfits (white, yellow, bright red, purple…). Probably everything we humans have learned about beauty we learned from them.

I love bulbs, because they are so loyal and independent; they hide most of the year, and then they catch us by surprise, appearing on their own where there was nothing. And they make us happy like a surprise visit of a dear friend.

Flowers are impermanent too, but in such a different way than a product that is cool one day and useless the next.

Yellow

So different, yet the same

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Today I ate my lunch outside. It was a warm, breezy spring day, one of these perfect days that we experience rarely in a year. The sky was blue, the trees full of white and pink flowers, the air felt and smelled sweet, and the breeze was just cold enough to make me appreciate the warmth of the sun.

It occurred to me that about 30 years ago I was having the same identical experience. I was in high school in Rome and that spring day I decided to eat lunch with a few friends in park. I was so much younger, I lived in a different city in a different country in a different continent. The world around me was different and I had different dreams and concerns. For all intents and purposes, I was a different person.

Yet the feeling of calm—as if time had suddenly slowed down and almost stopped—and awe at the beauty of that particular moment were the same. Perhaps there are feelings that don’t belong to us and cut through time and space, and are just there to be felt. Perhaps enlightenment is when we can quiet everything else inside us and outside of us and just be inside these unchanging experiences that are just there waiting for us to notice.

Evelyn Rodriguez on Art and Ambition

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Evelyn Rodriguez quotes Prabda Yoon, a writer from Bangkok who, among many things, led two drawing workshops for the victims of the Tsunami:

It would be difficult to find an ugly artwork by a child. That is probably because when a children make art, they don’t begin with an idea in their heads that what they are doing is making art.

Evelyn writes:

Perhaps ugliness springs from ambition (…) The quality of children’s art is that it defies all the annoying artistic ambitions held by most adults; the sorts of ambitions that turn art into making a career, or a self-serving, egotistical expression far removed from acts of creation inspired entirely by nature.

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Snowstorm in April

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After a few days of full warm and sunny spring, this morning we had a surprise snowstorm. Everybody in my office gathered around the window and watched incredulous the snow falling heavy, twirling in the strong wind. It didn’t last very long. But it reminded me how much power weather still has on us, even with all our air-conditioned glass buildings, excessive energy consumption, and unfounded feeling of control. Thankfully, Nature still has us.

Snowstorm in April