A Cloud Never Dies - Calligraphy – Parallax Press

As Zen poet Basho reminds us, The temple bell stops But the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.

“a cross between a cloud, a snail, and a piece of heavy machinery—a true religious presence.”

Clouds never truly disappear. They change form. They turn into rain and become part of the ocean, and then evaporate and return to being clouds.

we cut flowers from our garden to place on the altar, that is because we acknowledge the beauty of those flowers. All we can say is, “Although these flowers are beautiful, their beauty is fragile. When, in a few days time, these flowers die, their beauty will die with them.” We understand this, and when the flowers wilt in a few days, we will not s

while living, also live with death. Then death is not something far away, death is not something which is at the end of one’s life, brought about by some accident, disease or old age, but rather an ending to all the things of memory – that is death, a death not separate from living.

It offers an aesthetic ideal that uses the uncompromising touch of mortality to focus the mind on the exquisite transient beauty to be found in all things impermanent. It can be found in the arrangement of a single flower, the expression of profound emotion in three lines of poetry, or in the perception of a mountain landscape in a single rock.