The Unbearable Newness of Being

Today's Zen Calendar has this quote, from Wolfgang Goethe:


One must ask children

and birds how strawberries

and cherries


taste.

Of course, Goethe is referring not simply to taste but to the ability or willingness or capacity, the openness, to experience things fresh, first-hand, not with foreordained notions, not with predictable outcomes, not with preconceived templates.

We fail to do this often, thereby missing the Aha!

Of course, I find the Aha! from things in nature more easily than in people.