Beauty. What is Beauty? Do we really know? I recently heard a talk on Beauty and Words in reference to the teachings of the Lord of the Rings. Our world has valued efficiency over Beauty….roads, cars, strip malls, oil rigs, cranes, tankers, concrete, gray, cement, tarmac, box buildings, plastic and packaging of chemicals and life-less, toxic foods. What is the cost? We know, our guts know, our bones know. You can see the lack of it in the numbers of people requiring medications, the rising numbers of people with depression, anxiety, the number of gun shootings….the hollow stares while in a grocery line, rage behind the driving wheel, weak bodies carrying too much weight either in body form or thought forms, or both.
If you were given a choice of having millions of dollars AND always being surrounded by ugliness and scenes of destruction, OR having little financial wealth BUT always being surrounded by immense, stunning natural beauty, what would you choose?
Our hearts already know. This is Nature’s way. It is the Dao. Beauty wins. Everything in Nature is beautiful, old and young and all between. A Forest is full of life and death; death is the cup and cradle for new life and it is all beautiful.
Beauty is often turned into moral issue. Being or showing too much beauty is on the edge of morality…at least for a woman. And goodness has gone drab…again, often equated with a puritan sense of morality. Yet in some languages, such as ancient Greek, there is a word that means both Good and Beautiful. It is an energy we inherently know and trust. We gravitate towards it and water our own seeds of Good and Beauty.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”- That is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
~ John Keats
Beauty. Beauty. Beauty. What does it mean to you?
I step outside in Nature and am surrounded by it. I can stand and stare, observe, feel, witness Beauty in its many forms for hours. The other day while in the Land of OM (Olympic Mountains), I enjoyed some morning training in a mossy forest and qigong by the flowing river waters. Coming to a clearing, I looked up and was mesmerized. White, misty, flowing clouds. Above the trees they flowed north, moving, morphing into different shapes. The clouds….living, creating, always changing, always traveling. I watched and became a cloud; I shape shifted into a cloud and traveled as water, mist rising high over the tree tops and I spread, expanded and felt into the ocean shores, the mountain peaks behind me, trees peering over the sea side cliffs. I felt the tall stones rising from the beach waters, small rounds stones being bathed in the rolling, crashing waves and the vapors rising along the long expansive beach. I became all these things at once and an observer of all.
Morphing into these vapors on the sand and pebbles, again I rose. I rose into the sky, ever changing form and came back into the mist of adoring tears in my own eyes, again in my body witnessing, experiencing life and the innate Beauty of Nature.
Beauty feeds me. Beauty inspires awe, creativity, joy, happiness. Beauty creates and is one with Goodness. Beauty can be our compass. Are my thoughts creating beauty? Is my work creating beauty? Are my words, communications with those around me creating beauty? Are my adventures creating beauty? Am I creating beauty? Am I Beauty? Yes. We just require saying Yes to Beauty; Yes to Nature. Yes to Life. Mother Nature and our Wilderness are my Greatest Teachers in Beauty and in the Wisdom and Joy we can all awaken to.
