I think we first encounter beauty is the luminous moments of our childhood. Maybe it lay in our mother’s smile, in the way sunlight fell on our bed, or in the smell of new-mown grass. Those moments can inform our whole life. What do you remember as beautiful from back then?
For me it was sitting in the chair made out of a huge tree stump at my grandmother’s place above the Artic Circle. The land fell away from that spot, and in the distance was a lake and the grey-blue mountains beyond the glittering water. There was a feeling of forever there. Any time I need a moment of beauty I can go and sit in the old stump chair and fill up. I am sure each of us has an experience that opened us to beauty. To recall it and to savor it can make us more aware and open to the beauty around us now.
Phrases posted on Facebook, March 2015
The piles of snow along the streets have turned black with grime .Twigs and branches lie on the ground pruned by the wind. Inside the soul a need for beauty is growing, perhaps is always growing. Beauty is my subject for the month of March.
Our world is filled with so much rawness, ugliness and lack of regard. We do not even realize this much of the time. It’s a new normal. Then to place a simple flower on our table can be a conscious act of acknowledgement that beauty is a necessity. I think of it as a prayer or a protest demanding that we take care and nurture the needs of the soul.
Each of us contains a radiance, a soul beauty. To honor that natal gift we each have been given is a life task. The more we nurture and allow that beauty the more we invite beauty out of others. Radiance is our mutual home.
Our hearts are always whispering to us about the beauty that can be. Unless we trust the inspiration that beauty engenders in our hearts how can we free ourselves from what feel like inevitability and move to a sense of possibility? Will we listen? Will we dare? We are called to live beautifully.
Beauty not only enables us it also ennobles us for it illuminates the inherent order and wonder of the universe. In its presence we are relieved for a moment of our strategies and habits of control, free to see things anew with surprise and humility.
To see the beauty in each other is to open the door to possibility. To be recognized in our core beauty is a holy gift that engenders growth. It is the way of delight, an enduring present we can give to our partners, our children and our friends
So much in our lives is driven by purpose. We make necessity into a god and lose the deep truth that we have a destination in awe. Through it we can know that we belong to the holy order of things. Beauty invites our hearts to open to grandeur. It is as essential as food and shelter.
How is it that our faces become beautiful when we genuinely smile? It is as if something of the inward man or woman peeps through and brings sunshine to the moment. We see the more that moves in and through us.
Did you ever think that beauty might be seeking itself in us? What if it longs for a home in our consciousness so that it can be expressed in ways that are anywhere from grand to very simple?
When beauty touches us we are granted moments of transcendence and found again as if we had been lost in a pedestrian existence. To me it feels as if we are drawn out of ourselves into a kind of hopefulness about life and being.
Norms of beauty are imprinted on us by culture, by fashion, by passing cycles of human awareness. There is a current aesthetic so to speak. But beauty lies beyond such categories. It is always calling us out of old forms into surprises, into inexplicable encounters, paradoxes and soul touching moments.
Happy Vernal Equinox to everyone. Light and dark are in balance today. Sun and moon joined in the eclipse. Snow on the way in CT and rain to follow. There is a hidden harmony in balance when we don’t insist that something is exclusively better than something else. I think Beauty lives in paradox and we invite her when we are not too insistent with our preferences.
Real beauty cannot be controlled or tamed. Somehow it catches us by surprise and not only tames us but names us as well. Does that mean that we have a beauty name? I love wondering about that. What do you think?
It is our inner attitude that determines much of our experience. Demanding that things should look good or be right pushes them away. Pushing to make connections with people or with domains of knowledge sets up inevitable barriers. When we are patient, respectful and maybe a little reverent towards what we don’t know or don’t yet have, we build an invisible bridge where real meetings can more easily occur, sometimes miraculously. We call those meetings beautiful.
Isn’t beauty in its own domain somehow silent? Without our recognition doesn’t it live in an everywhere/nowhere? Could it be that a central part of our humanity is to perceive beauty in the world and in others and so be able to name it, sing it, and share it?
We cannot own beauty. We can buy beautiful things and think we have acquired her by right of provenance. But beauty always escapes. She shimmers away and glints now here and now there but cannot be caught. She brings to the soul her gifts that are ours only by receiving them on the move.
Beauty is the weaver between the touchable and the hidden, between the present and the eternal, between matter and spirit. If we want beauty to inhabit our lives we must allow
our experiences to be in the weaving of two domains.
What puts music in your face and resilience in your step? What makes you trust that life is dear? Isn’t it the love/joy that beauty by whatever name invokes?
There is an expression it takes one to know one. When we see beauty is it because we have something corresponding inside? Is it like a two-way mirror? Seeing and knowing . . being seen and known. Aaahh beauty you touch us and we are touched to the core.
