What if you knew you'd be the last to touch someone? Ellen Bass draws us in to the brief moments of contact that fill our day and urges us to consider the fleeting nature of every life we meet.
Tag: transience
The Expression of a Better World – Anaïs Nin on Transience and the Painful, Familiar Beauty of Music
Anaïs Nin on music, mortality, and what it is to glimpse a joyful vision of a land from which we came and which we have forgotten.
Tamerlie Philippe – Fading Memories
Inspired by memories from her country of origin, Haiti, Tamerlie Philippe's faceless paintings are an ambivalent, diminishing recollection of home.
Milarepa’s Song of Transiency and Delusion
Milarepa is a much-loved figure in the Tibetan tradition, renowned for his songs that expound the teaching of the Buddha and his own dharmic worldview.
Buddhism’s Most Basic Teaching: Everything Changes
Shunryu Suzuki on our inability to accept the truth that we and everything around us are in a state of constant flux.
Erich von Hungen – The Moment
The pinpoint perspective of the present moment can feel so sharp but ultimately always impossible to fathom and out of our reach. As Erich von Hungen writes, it is simultaneously hard and soft, early and late, tiny and all-encompassing 'like a pocket-sized Big Bang.'
Edna St. Vincent Millay – “When You, That at This Moment Are to Me”
This sonnet by American poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay is addressed to a lover and to the latent sense of impermanence and loss built in to all moments when one becomes conscious of great love or great happiness.
Heidi Woo – The Heart of Our Home
The Heart of Our Home is a poem about moving one's life and a meditation on building a new life in a new place that touches upon themes of nostalgia, renewal, and hope
Arthur Sze – First Snow
Arthur Sze's postmodern poetic style includes elements of Taoist and Zen philosophy written in a deeply observational style. Influenced by William Carlos Williams and Chinese poets like Bei Dao, Arthur Sze's work can be a difficult but rewarding read.