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FRAGMENT FROM NATURE. The Japanese Edo period, morning glories (and tulips) is the topic of the next two weekends, inspired by a visit to the truly excellent Tokyo National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan). During the Edo period, Japanese horticulturalists were driven by a remarkable respect for nature and desire for beauty, which was embedded in their overall cultural philosophy. A fitting follow-on from the Fragment that "Nature writ large is a mess." Messiness has its own beauty. View in LinkedIn

SEAMLESS INTEGRATION. "Wabi-sabi – “a Japanese aesthetic of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete” – is, in my view, deeply related to satoyama culture’s rustic, practical sensibilities and seamless integration of the inner life with the built and natural worlds." https://lnkd.in/dF34Jtd View in LinkedIn

"WABI-SABI represents Japanese aesthetics and a Japanese world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence, specifically impermanence, suffering and emptiness or absence of self-nature." https://lnkd.in/dN2d-kv View in LinkedIn

BEING PRESENT IN THE EPHEMERAL might be another expression of the suchness of things. The day fades, the snowflake melts, life passes, but even passing beauty, or especially passing beauty, has lasting virtue in the prepared human mind. View in LinkedIn

THE SUCHNESS OF THINGS. "When beauty is expressed in terms of Buddhism, it is a form of self-enjoyment of the suchness of things. Flowers are flowers, mountains are mountains, I sit here, you stand there, and the world goes on from eternity to eternity, this is the suchness of things." https://lnkd.in/dxMSEuc View in LinkedIn

EDO DRIVE FOR PERFECTION. "The Edo-period economy had an especially striking characteristic: the concerted drive for technological expertise." https://lnkd.in/d9aZjst View in LinkedIn

BASHO'S POEMS. "These poetic expressions have a paradoxical nature. The humor and the despair that he expresses are not implements to encourage a belief in human potential or to glorify it. If anything, Basho's oeuvre characteristically announces more his belief in the mediocrity of human existence the more he describes men's deeds and this makes us conscious of the greatness of the power of nature." http://web-japan.org/museum/others/uta/haiku/haiku_01.html View in LinkedIn

NO LACK. "Mammals provide a plethora of examples of vestigial structures." https://lnkd.in/eMd4h72 View in LinkedIn

VESTIGIAL CORNERSTONE. "History has revised them, creationists deny them, but vestigial organs are still an unmistakable part of our evolutionary heritage." https://lnkd.in/eTmF_BF View in LinkedIn

CIRCULATORY AND UROGENITAL VESTIGES "Other clear developmental ‘vestiges’ come from the circulatory system of eutherian (placental) mammals, which undergo rapid and radical changes from fetal to newborn circulation, and from vertebrate urogenital (excretory and reproductive) systems, which in both males and females share many incipient structures that quickly shift function during sexual differentiation." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn