Waking to Beauty

Its Monday. The beginning of a new week. It is a rich week of rehearsing and refining He Dreamed a Train, a work that has had one season in 2014 and is going to have another one this year. New work needs several seasons to find its feet, its rhythm, so that it can awaken to its inner beauty. For all plays are beautiful, even when dealing with scratchy subjects. To see live performers on stage, communicating important ideas, breathing the same air as its audience, well it is delicious.

..and there are other performances that happen throughout our day, performances that are beautiful, memorable, delightfully vibrant. Small people such as the little one in the photo below,  who see things for the first time...and they teach us to wake to the beauty that is around us. Its the little things. I remember a line we wrote for Phluxus2's The Paratrooper Project: 'its the little things'...and the more I live the more I realise it is the little things that enrich our day. Not the big news or the big offers or any of the possessions we accumulate...it is the slow smile that grows across a baby's face when she recognises her Grandy. It is the rose that is saying "Good morning" to the sun. 

...the coffee pot, the cushion, the wind...

David Whyte's poem 'Lost' is a beautiful contribution to the power of now...and as I walk, I try to remember these words:

Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you

are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here.

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger. 

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers.

I have made this place around you;

If you leave it you may come back again,saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you. 

David Whyte, thank you.

in The Heart Aroused pp 259-60