The Face Of One Little Child
This single flower
has leaves and roots
that take nourishment from
the environing soil and air.
And the soil contains the distilled nutrients
of past growth and decay that constitute
the living ecological system
in which all of its participants are
organically interdependent.
The sun enables the flower to process these nutrients,
while the atmosphere that caresses the flower
also nourishes and protects it.
By the time we have “cashed out”
the complex of conditions that conspire
to produce and conserve this particular flower,
one ripple after another
in an every-extending series
of radial circles,
we have implicated the entire cosmos
within it
without remainder.
For the Taoist,
there is an intoxicating bottomlessness
to any particular event in our experience.
The entire world resides
happily in the smile on the dirty face
of this one little child.
A Philosophical Translation Dao De Jing, “Making This Life Significant” by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall
The following photos were captured in the garden of Claude Monet the famous Impressionist painter. Monet wanted to capture the effect of surface reflection on water. Monet diverted a branch of the Epte River to create the water garden at Giverny. The views within the garden, of Monet’s home alone make a trip to Paris worth taking.
4 thoughts on “The Face Of One Little Child”
For the Taoist, there is an intoxicating bottomlessness to any particular event in our experience. So profound!
Yes. And that style of thinking may be cultivated, an always approachable, even if never perfectly achieved appreciation of the warp and weft, waking to this life.
There is always an extended appreciation for a specific subject when one can experience the source, as you did with the home of Claude Monet. On the other hand when we can immerse ourselves in the extraordinary beauty of our own backyards, be they out our kitchen door or down the block at a small nature preserve, we create our own Giverny. Sometimes we take those places for granted. They are so close by that their everyday availability diminishes them until we stop and look at them with new eyes. Our own personal paradise.
Well expressed! Paradise is right here, right now!