Hardly a day passes without some sadness or bitterness touching our lives. Sometimes the waves of grief and pain are relentless.
However, both sadness and bitterness have a bright side as well. After the storm comes a lovely calm. Aristotle, in his "Poetics," states: "The element of the wonderful is required in tragedy." Therefore, in this essay, I would like to consider some phrases from the bright side found in sadness and bitterness.
Perhaps it takes a lifetime to fully realize what bitter tears are. Under the weight of years one tastes various griefs and pains which can serve to deepen one's understanding of life if one is aware. For example, the Japanese haiku poet and mendicant Zen priest Santoka Taneda (1882-1940), in his childhood days, witnessed the moment his mother killed herself. He tasted the ice of grief to its core. Later in life he was inspired to minimize his material life and maximize his spiritual life through writing haiku; to pray for the peace of his mother's soul; to polish his bitter tears into poetry. He expressed his experience in a free-style haiku thus: