I came across in my daily meditation - To see the tiny spark of beauty in everything...even the bleakest and most depressing of situations.
Here's the thing - Our minds have a way of focussing on negative things: things that are not aligned with the picture we have in our mind, things that shouldn't/needn't be there and things that should/could be there, things that need to be done or can be done and are not being done, people who are not cast in the mould our minds have made....and so on....there are a thousand million things that we find fault with. It is the same with sadness...we often see the sad part of the whole picture instead of the rest of the picture.
Mind you, we are able to find these faults with no real effort...they just kind of flow through our mind. However, what they do as they flow through our mind is that they pollute the general atmosphere of our mind, which then goes on to pollute the rest of the body. Likewise with sadness....it seeps into our very consciousness changing the colors of the landscape of our heart and mind to grey and black.
Now the challenge is to stop and really SEE what we are LOOKING at.
And we WILL see that teey-weeny bit of something good and pure and lovable and beautiful in that whole picture we are looking at and labelling as wretched or painfully sad.
Try it. In a bleak landscape, you will hear the sound of a bird, or see a beetle scurrying across....In a terribly sad situation such as having lost a loved one, or having had to give up a job, or being in a state of deep depression, see the person who smiles at you and brings up a happy memory, or paints a pretty picture of something that means something to you or let that memory that is tugging at your heart surface....and you will see that the whole picture changes. The hue changes, the tone changes, and the timbre changes....and that is all we need to take the next step forward.
'Even in winter when the branches are covered by snow the plum blossoms are still fragrant.' ~ Shadows and Blossoms by Lian Hearn.