Rose tinted twilight;
alert
serenity, poised
with effortless grace.
Jim Gordon
Yes haiku is poetry, and at least once this week I though I might be permitted a wee bit self indulgence and share one of my own Haiku! The photo was taken at Loch Skene this Spring during a long slow sunset. This time it isn't really the poem that "does it", its the combination of the poem and the picture, the memory of such a beautiful moment and its capture in words that in turn recall the memory.
What is it about beauty that brings a lump to our throats and makes it hard to swallow? Then there's the deeper sense, that the power of beauty to apprehend us floods us with an inner joy and outer clarity so that we see, we pay attention and we glimpse that which is beyond us. There are few moments in our lives in which we more closely encounter truth, than those moments of clarity when unexpected beauty illumines our world, and our painful longings for goodness are strengthened from ideal into resolve. Such transforming moments of encounter with beauty, goodness and truth are what Aquinas understood as contemplative theololgy, when the three transcendentals of beauty, goodness and truth are integrated by love, experienced and expressed as a transformative trinity of human responsiveness to the Eternal Love that occasionally irupts and bathes all creation with radiant glory.
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