Beauty in Ephemerality versus the Worship of Permanence and Homogenisation...

In my garden are blossoms and blooms of many varieties. I watched as they magically appeared each day, then to my delight burst open at various intervals to reveal something quite breathtaking.  From their very inception desiccation begins.  The element of ephemerality in nature’s beauty is a gift and I’m thankful for being able to recognise it and live with gratitude for every bloom that has quickly come to peep at the sun and go, leaving me another gift of a green leaf and what is to follow in the cycle.

I love that when I leave behind my socialised state of being I live the connectedness to everything natural, and this is something better than any fantasy or way of being in the world we as a civilisation continue to create.  In trying to fit with what we as a society create is the delusion of the necessity to conform to the strange phenomena of homogeneity.  I’m talking about fashion and the latest gadget and what’s in, what’s considered cool or beautiful.  I love the solace in simply existing, without autobiography or biography, and instead only a right now.

Nothing we create has the power of the beauty that manifests as part of the natural world. We manifest from a subjective bubble of what we have absorbed from our socialisation and culturalisation and often hold on to that manifestation or what we think is cleverness in the creation, long after something has broken – in our values.  We don’t grow.  We don’t blossom. Look at women and beauty and what we do to maintain youthfulness, (I suppose this remark relates to the post about Love Ageing it’s a BeautyinBeing).  We even hold on to emotions to repeat the buzz, to hold on to a feeling of happiness and sadly base a whole lifestyle or relationship upon one original moment where we felt something wonderful.

In Westerm culture and some other cultures, humans like to possess and in the possession gain power and a sense of self, (or at least we think we do).  One might say to me now that I simply have different values, but is that it?  I’m not judging, only observing the different aspects of myself, the me who goes into the world and interacts with others and try though I might to love the homogenised way that people are out there I can’t feel in myself or observe in others – the same beautyinbeing I observe in nature.  Instead I feel and see only sadness and emptiness from the continual longing, needing, desire for things, stuff, power.  I feel an unfillable void when I try to live that way.

When I am present, when I am in my unaltered mind space with consciousness and without having to slot into the race I see that real beauty is fragile – not permanent.  It’s an ephemeral gift.  We’ve learned to pass it over and to invest in the value of holding on to things…

Ephemerality, I am in awe of the exquisiteness of it because as it repeats itself I am with it and, it shows me eternity in the cycle of life.  I transcend the human experience of thinking and embrace the mortality that I feel within and the appreciation of this gift fills me with love.  I was born this way.  I have always been the observer who shied away from the loudness, the vulgarity of human needing, wanting and acquisition.  To truly appreciate emphemerality you have to live it and embrace it within yourself – think the movie Avatar.

I’d rather live with a sense of ephemerality than worship permanence by constantly seeking out ways to keep things like youthfulness or my waistline and all the other things we worship in order to remain…

I think I tweeted once I’d rather ornament myself with leaves and branches and flowers than wrap myself in synthetic cloth with painted flowers.

Behind me now my thirteen-year-old strums her guitar, interrupts her humming and says, “Mum, listen to the wind, it’s beautiful.”  I turn and am drawn into her beautyinbeing now, I listen to it manifesting as she strums. Her innocence will fade if she is taken from her connectedness, but if she manages to hold on to it, the nature of mortality and ageing will see her one day old and withered and still innocent; she is beautiful in every state of her desiccation.  How I love to be with her blossoming and how in awe I am that she will in time, become the green leaf, the yellow leaf and eventually pass into the cycle of life.

I’m leaving the computer now to go outside and touch a leaf, feel the morning dew on the hydrangea bush bursting with flower and to let impermanence resonate in me, to feel my own mortality as ephemeral.  Eternity is not in holding on, it’s instead in living the ephemeralness and in doing so recognising that we too are part of the great cycle of life.

Eternity is such a wasted dream in comparison to being with and appreciating
ephemerality, which is so very exquisite in the relinquishment of the desire to remain static.

“I honour the place in you in which the entire Universe dwells, I honour the place in you which is of Love, of Integrity, of Wisdom and of Peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are One.”