nuns studying Sanskrit texts
Mai An Hoa
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration
Wordsworth wrote the poem from which those lines were taken after walking on the beach with his ten year old illegitimate daughter. The girl, he noted, didn’t seem at all moved by the beauty of the setting sun…and yet her youth and innocence kept her more attuned to the wonder of the world than all his knowledgeable awareness. She might not have been touched by the solemnity of the moment, but she was more in touch with the moment itself than he could ever be.
These young Buddhist novices, sitting quietly at their studies, are poised on a balancing point. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. And yet the more they understand, the more they’ll think and thought is a filter that retards experience. Thought takes you out of the moment.
What Wordsworth understood…and what these novices are learning…is that there are many ways to love being in the world. Whether you’re the old poet walking along the shingle beach, the young girl walking guilelessly beside him, or the pink-robed nuns reading on the steps, this is the holy time. It’s always the holy time, even if you’re not aware of it.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
