A Simple Table: Lilies of the Field

Just couldnt resist this picture : )

A few qoutes, from Kierkegaard's "The Lily Of The Field, The Bird Of The Air":

One thing there is which all Satan's cunning and all the snares of temptation cannot take by surprise, and that is simplicity. What Satan spies with keenness of sight as his prey (but what is never found in the lilies and the birds), what all temptation aims at, certain of its prey (but what is never found in the lilies and the birds)—is the ambiguous...

Seek first the kingdom of God. The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air. From the lily and the bird as teachers, let us learn silence, or learn to be silent...

Out there with the lilies and the birds thou dost sense that thou art before God, a fact which is generally so entirely forgotten in speech and conversation with other men. For when there are two of us only that talk together, not to say ten or more, it is so easily forgotten that thou and I, we two, or we ten, are before God. But the lily who is the teacher is profound. It does not enter into conversation with thee, it keeps silent, and by keeping silent it would signify to thee that thou art before God....

And some reflections on that same work, from Hermit's Thatch:

Every nuance to the word “simplicity” is a necessary understanding of the very concept: simplicity as uncomplicated, simplicity as innocence or naivete, simplicity as directness, simplicity as candor. But simplicity as more than attitude or speech means applying a concept to behavior, action, and habit. How to make our daily lives uncomplicated, innocent, direct, and candid is, first, an aesthetic issue and, secondly, an ethical one...

The aesthetics of solitude, reflected in the austere huts of hermits, classical poetry, rounds of meditation or hours, modest herbal gardens and wooden eating bowls, and the like, are aesthetics that point to ethics in terms of lifestyles and disengagement from the world. We can glimpse these intimations, color or dilute them somewhat for lay people in urban settings, and still imagine what simplicity is. Of course, if these aesthetic suggestions do not seem motivating, we will probably not succeed in simplifying our lives, throwing our hands up in despair at how remote our daily lives are from genuine simplicity.

And in modern times, it may well be impossible to be simple without fading away from public life altogether, from media, technology, and communications like — ironically — the Internet. Pushed hard enough towards radical simplicity, we can begin to perceive a radical ethics in simplicity, not merely aesthetics or a “bourgeois” ethics.

Kierkegaard indirectly offers a discussion of simplicity..."From the lily and the bird as teachers, let us learn silence, or learn to be silent."

Truly the beginning of simplicity is silence, for only silence ends the adornments we add to feelings, the adornments we append to idle thoughts, the gravitas we assign to even our deliberate thoughts. We must be neither the exultant Christian nor the aggrieved pagan but the bird, whose absence of consciousness lets it exalt and grieve in natural order or sequence, with a kind of ruthless necessity that consciousness ever shields from us.

(Image from here)