Today’s Life-Line is:

The Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

~ Richard Wilbur
from Collected Poems: 1943-2004

REFLECTION: This poem is worth several, slow, meditative readings especially for those of us who live in parts of the world where we are well into the season of Autumn, a time of beauty and change. Wilbur’s imagery and double entendres invite the reader to reflect on the beauty of nature and the nature of beauty, to become aware of beautiful changes and the way the beautiful changes, both in kindly ways and in ways that sever. Like the seasons of the natural world, so too humans experience loss and change that have the capacity to rearrange our sense of what is beautiful, to break us apart and to bring us together, to initiate “a second finding,” and to return us to wonder. Knowing the severance involved in change, are we willing nonetheless to tune our skin to this new, unknown beauty, grow into it like the mantis so we can taste that green that is deeper than we can imagine?