Every tree is beautiful
No matter where it is
But some take your breath away
In the sheer grace of abundance
Of nature’s manifestation.
Speaking of trees
There is tree that comes to mind
That I used to always be charmed by
In my daily walk while in a distant land
It is a beautiful tree in Rennes France
A glance would be enough to feel
The gratitude welling up in me
For the bounties of nature!
So grateful!
Savvy
When you are in love…
Love makes you hear music, you have never heard before,
Love makes your steps look like a dance.
Love makes your heart flutter in abandon.
Love makes you see the truth of beauty in the ordinary.
Love is the gift of grace from your soul.
Be in love. Be in love
With yourself and the world around.
And make both a better place to be in.
Be in love with life…
Live life lovingly!
Savvy
Photography by Savvy
My piece of sky…
As the winds blows
Waves of patterns
Flowing like fluffs
Of cotton clouds
Waltzing in the sky!
Savvy
Art and the Artist
Can life express without art
Can art have meaning without life
When life meets art
There are endless expansions
One knows not where life begins
And art flows…
Or art begins and life flows…
Creativity enables itself
In a flow of the infinite abundance
And never ending expressions.
Savvy
Yes, there are moments
When life imitates art,
And art emotes life!
This is one of them. Do watch.
From time immemorial
Existence equaled spaces
Life equated space as a given
All a matter of life and death.
Our history is a witness
Of the story of spaces
Fought for, on and upon
Mauraded or harvested
The mystic and majesty
Lies in the significance of spaces
Spaces breathed and birthed
Spaces nurtured in nature
Spaces in and around us
Breathtaking magnificent
Stark manifestations
Of ground realities
Spaces in time eternal
Spaces bygone
And yet to be encountered
Spaces lived and loved
Spaces taken for granted
Spaces usurped and owned
Spaces pursued and protected
Spaces encroached and freed.
Gratitude to the powers that are
In the spaces between
The two words, two beings or two breaths
Between stillness and movement.
Savvy
In the lives of many women
Being strong is not an option
It is a necessity!
In a world riddled with inequalities
In a world full of double standards
Standing up for yourself
Becomes a tool for survival.
In those tricky moments
In a blink of an eye
Push comes to shove
Pleasure turns to pain
Hurt and betrayal
Seems to fill the air
There she is, left standing alone
To fend for herself on her own.
It is then that she meets fear in the eye
Faces the dark side of humanity
Sensing power in her vulnerability.
Who says a woman is weak?
Watch her rise like a phoenix!
Tremendous is her tenacity!
Resourceful is her resiliency!
The strength of a woman
Braves through the rising storm
Daring beyond the hurt and pain
Fighting through the wrong doings
She moves on to heal and build
In hope and faith in a new morrow
For she knows in her heart
Tommorow is another day!
Savvy
My dedication to Women all around the world!
Every Day is Women’s Day !
Happy Women’s Day!
As love conquers you it blesses you in the knowing.
Make not a mockery of love
Serenade love and allow it to speak truth
Love surfaces from the depth of emotions
To mend you and this world to a better place.
As true love is eternal
Free as bird in flights of oblivion
Travelling in the abandon
Of the wilderness of the spirit
Yet bonded in the boundless infinity
Endless love a gift of grace
Acknowledge this treasure
Blending two souls in one
As a life loved is well lived… such a rare sight!
What a blessing it truly is….A love like that!
In realising the many miracles of life is knowing a love that can move the soul of our being. We can consider ourselves lucky to even have been touched by a love like that!
Savvy
Happy Valentine’s Day to all my friends and readers!!!
Watch this magical murmuration
In divine interconnection
Countless birds in a dance of symphony
Creating patterns in rhythmic harmony.
An enthralling aerial display.
That moves you with its magical sway
Makes you wish and wonder why
These flock of feathers fly this way!
In the swing and the sway
And the rise and fall
The flight of these birds
Interweave a cohesive harmony.
A rare sight both elusive and enigmatic
Orchestrated with brilliance
Perhaps simply waltzing with abandon
Perhaps to ward off the predator
With such seemingly chaotic order
Every dancing heart will delight
In acknowledging with awe
This dance of sychrony!
Savvy
Watch “European Birds at Baramati Pune” on YouTube
Here is a bit more on this beautiful phenomenon in the sky.
Beautiful flower
Tell me your secret
How unassuming of you
To show up with so much beauty
All for a single day in the sun?
Beautiful flower
You paint a lovely picture
Of hope and positivity
Of endearing tenderness
That speaks much without a word.
Beautiful flower
Your colour makes my day better
Having seen you blossom in full glory.
You awaken a sense of purpose
In one and all relentlessly every day.
Beautiful flower
Your sight brings joy
Your touch gentleness
Your being fragrance
You are a sight to behold!
Beautiful flower
My heartfelt gratitude to you.
For bestowing us all, your grace of being.
Today and every day!
Savvy
A few pictures that I clicked this morning in my terrace garden. I don’t know the names of these beauties but I do know they made me reflect with a certain gladness, simply partaking in a vision of their tender presence.
Waltz of the Eyes
If eyes could speak
They would say a thousand words
May be more
Yes eyes speak more than words can tell
Have you seen eyes up close
They say much more
There is defiance denial
Hurt and humility
Fear and pain
Sadness and confusion
Longing for approval
And anguish of anxiety
There is judgement and approval
Brazeness and courage
Hope and trust
Mystic and magic
Enigma so magnetic
And yet there is also
Surprise and innocence
Charm and grace
Kindness and Generosity
A Light of Love
For life and living.
Waltz of the Eyes indeed! Speaking much without words that portrays the undeniable truths of life .
How much life experiences can speak through these windows of our soul! Check it for yourself … so much to read in there. May be you can see much more ….do share!
Savvy
Thank you dear Efi for mentioning Stavros and this beautiful lilting music…’Waltz of the Eyes’ in my earlier post.This waltz is truly bewitching! 💙💙💙
When I shared this beautiful picture of the Jacaranda Trees on the social media yesterday this post got a lot of responses… and continues to pour in still. Perhaps it touches the chord of connectedness somewhere amidst the roots.
Am highlighting a few learnings along the way for me through this post.
My friend John Rylance mentioned about how much the beautiful work ‘ Endymion’ the poem with the opening line ….
‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’ by John Keats applies to this picture . In his words ..
So much of this poem reflects your Jacaranda tree picture, it could so easily be an illustration to accompany the work.@John Rylance
Sharing a few curated verses from the poem Endymion-
A thing-beauty-joy-ever…
Paths there were many,
Winding through palmy fern, and rushes fenny,
And ivy banks; all leading pleasantly To a wide lawn,
whence one could only see Stems thronging all around between
the swell Of turf and slanting branches: who could tell
The freshness of the space of heaven above,
Edg’d round with dark tree tops? through which a dove
Would often beat its wings, and often too
A little cloud would move across the blue.
Endymion is a poem by John Keats first published in 1818. It begins with the line “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”. Endymion is written in rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. Wikipedia Originally published: 1818
I also came across the video clip about these trees there..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW61D92WV1I
In response my friends Claire Cardwell and Gert Scholtz mentioned about Pretoria and Johanesburg in South Africa having huge number of these trees still.. inspite of the opposition to these so called alien invasions …
@Savvy Raj there was a very vocal minority a few years back that wanted to chop down all the Jacaranda trees as they are not indigenous to South Africa. Fortunately the majority over-ruled them! You can’t however now buy a Jacaranda sapling at the nursery to plant in your garden. I do love them, I think the best places to see them in Joburg are in Linden, Northcliff Hill and in an office block in Rosebank – looking down all you can see is purple. Thanks for the post! Claire Cardwell
@Savvy Raj Jacaranda’s are truly beautiful. They bloom this time of year and our street plus many surrounding areas are covered with bright blue-purple flowers. Pretoria is known as the Jacaranda city, but Johannesburg where I live, actually has more of these trees lining the streets. Very nice post Savvy – thanks for the video too.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever indeed!
Thank you all for your amazing contributions.
And then as I happened to share this photograph with my family and here is what my mother comes up with…
“The twisted branches signify the conflicts in our wavering minds and the clarity of the sky of the blue in the background with the bewitching pink flowers assures us of the positive solutions at the end .” Anjana
Indeed so much learnings in the sharings …
What did you see in the picture ?
It is often said that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”…. as beauty can be a very subjective and a personal choice and experience of life. This attraction or admiration, after all, is an interpretation of harmony, of proportion in the features attributed to a culture for beauty.
Is beauty measurable to a certain standard? Well according to the Golden Ratio, the ideal result for an attractive face would be 1.6. Greeks believed a beautiful face is 1.6 times longer than its width. But then it has been refuted by attributing it simply to the ability of pattern recognition by humans. After all cultural differences have strange ideas of what is beautiful and they seem poles apart from each other. Such is the paradox of beauty!
From smooth skin devoid of wrinkles, a long neck and flowing hair, to face tattoos and body scars, long earlobes, shaved heads, pale skins to small feet, to full figures different countries and culture have different standards of beauty.
Take the case of some Eastern countries where straightened hair is considered beautiful and many are turning to chemical hair straighteners and flat ironing for holding up to standards of beauty. Girls in Mauritania, West Africa when shown an article about liposuction, laugh so hard in disbelief as it shocks their concepts of what is beautiful. In fact, this goes to extreme measures like ‘Leblouh’ the practice of force feeding girls to have heavy figures and stretch marks like in Mauritania, to the overwhelming numbers of rhinoplasty in Iran and where women wearing post-surgical bandages consider it as a badge of honour and wealth.
The human capacity to appreciate beauty has perhaps radically evolved with the species and men and woman see and process beauty differently. Humans are complex beings and if beauty were a language, its expression would be unique to every individual with respect to their nature and nurture.
So in the quest towards understanding the beauty and the ideals of beauty, there are many questions …
Is there a possibility of greater survival of what is considered beautiful.?
Or is the reverse true?
History is replete with numerous wars on account or on behalf of desire to possess own nurture, save and protect beautiful people animals or things.And beauty becomes a victim of situations and often is the cause of chaos and destruction.
The very beauty that emits an utter of exclamation of awe in the admiration of the exquisite creation can extract emotional outbursts and create and spread hate and malice, upheavals that can mar the course of peace in history and cause wars.
Beauty can thus become a two-edged sword.
Is there more to the reason there exists for the quality of beauty and its perception.The genetic codes that determine beauty can be there for the purpose of an evolution of the species and refinement in the subtlety of consciousness….
There is beauty in a soul that is kind without prejudice
There is beauty in choosing to transform to a better person inside out.
There is beauty in words spoken and deeds of generosity
There is beauty in making people feel valuable
As after all beauty is in the way you make another feel.
Savvy
Image Credits: An Artwork by Savvy Raj from a series Titled: ‘Faces’
Savvy Raj 