Sei Shonagon "Pilow Book"

The last post was about beauty. This theme stirred me up and gave a new impulse to life. Suddenly an interesting blog about dress style came across, I realized that I am sick of the jeans and I decided to go through my wardrobe. Chekhov said: "people should be beautiful in every way - in their faces,  in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves." I looked at the way I dress .... And if you think that one's exterior is the mirror of one's soul, the conclusions suggest themselves. 

The result of a three-hour shuffling through clothes was a little black dress made for me in an expensive studio, and which, because of the move to the country side was lying unused for three years. So I, the former town business diva, decided to put it on the same day. With glittering black beads and elegant shoes  I went with my family to a pizzeria.

It is always like that, I plunge in the flow of daily affairs, until something shakes me up. Right now the idea of beauty has stirred me up very strongly, maybe it was a sign of a forthcoming illness because after only three hours of fitting and changing I caught a cold. In any case, I read the "Pilow Book" of Sei Shonagon in bed and drinking tea with lemon. 

While reading Sei Shonagon  I remembered one Taoist master who said the following: "Only pleasure can be a source of strength. Pleasure is the music which plays when you write your  pages of the Book of Life.  If there is no pleasure it may be that your pages of the Book of Life remain empty ... Woman is a tool of pleasure. Of the thousands of pictures she chooses inexplicably the one that brings pleasure... Women always ask how to attract a man. The answer is simple - learn to enjoy, the stronger you feel  pleasure, the more your fans will want to experience this feeling with you. Without them knowing it, their body will find you anywhere in the universe.  Energy of pleasure is the most powerful tool to attract people to yourself."

All the above said by  the Taoist master is inherent to Sei Shonagon who is a true woman. In her diary, written over a thousand years ago and which resembles a modern blog, she describes what she likes and dislikes, what brings joy and what irritates her. She has a highly developed sense of beauty, her diary is full of descriptions of nature, or rather brief  sketches. The same Taoist master said about the effect that beauty has upon us: "When you contemplate something beautiful or return  to the image of the beautiful in your mind, positive expectations associated with that image appear in your brain. If this image is strong enough to capture your attention and consume all of your ability to focus, your body will be relaxed, like algae in a mountain stream, and the energy flow like a crystal clear mountain stream will flow through it, and you will be filled with joy. .."

Sei Shonagon is one of those who remind you that learning to enjoy exquisite music, spring flowering, beautiful paintings, and reading should be never stopped. 

Now let me go out and enjoy the music of our river and begonias :-)