While staying with my family in the UK this summer, I was rather taken with this translation of the Upanishads by Shree Purohit Swami and W. B. Yeats which I found on my stepdad’s book shelf. Especially the first few lines:
That is perfect. This is perfect. Perfect comes from perfect. Take perfect from perfect, the remainder is perfect.
May peace and peace and peace be everywhere.
Sometimes I find it hard to see perfection in everything, but never hard to see in my son Dan!
When I was taking Dan to school this morning, he suddenly shouted ‘Dappled light!’ when he saw some created by the tree leaf shadows and the sun. It reminded me of one of the few poems I remember from school which I quite like –
Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
