"What is dying ...."

What is dying?   I am standing on the sea shore.  A ship sails and spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.  She is an object of beauty and I stand watching her till at last she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says ‘She is gone’. Gone where?  Gone from my sight, that is all;  she is just as large in the masts, hull ad spars she was when I saw her … The diminished size and loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at that moment when someone at my side says ‘She is gone’, there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout, ‘There she comes’ …

Bishop Charles H Brent

"Some of you ...."

Some of you will perhaps be surprised — though not those who best understand that nothing is surprising in the human spirit — when I say that life never seemed so beautiful as it does now, when to many others it begins to be a burden. May God, who has brought me to this age, transport me from this vain mortal life to the true eternal life, as now I prize higher one day of this ripeness than do most young man prize a year of their bloom…

Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch)

"Understand impermanence ...."

Understand impermanence.  Contemplate the transitory.

"Chronicles of Tao"

"Age, toward which you draw ...."

Age, toward which you draw amid the storms of life, is nothing so dreadful. Those who call it so have found all stages of life unwelcome, thanks to their mishandling of life, not to a particular age.

Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch)

"I cannot tell you ...."

I cannot tell you if the dead,

Who loved us fondly when on earth,

Walk by our side, sit at our hearth,

By ties of old affection led....

But this I know--in many dreams

They come to us from realms afar,

And leave the golden gates ajar

Through which immortal glory streams.

The Dead

And if with prayer and praise thy heart is filled,

Its fever cooled, its stormy passions stilled,

If thou dost catch faint glimpses of that shore

Where sorrow dies, and parting is no more,

And thou canst almost solve death's mystery,

O, then, God's handmaid, Beauty, dwells with thee!

Albert Laighton, Beauty