Beauty Just Is
“Beauty can both
shout and whisper,
and still
it explains nothing.”
I’ve recently been enjoying Mary Oliver’s book of poems, Felicity, and took particular note of the words quoted above. Beauty, as I’m conceiving of it through her words, can be loud, quiet, bold, subtle, and everything in between, and it is full and complete in itself. It doesn’t point to something else, it doesn’t conceptualize, categorize, analyze, it doesn’t mean something outside of itself, it just Is.
Life can become mediated by innumerable layers of intellectual analysis, and beauty can strike through these layers to the raw skin of being human, or just being alive, helping us drop our thoughts about things and recover our ability to directly experience them. Poetry can do this. Music can do this. Visual art can do this. And, I believe, anything can do this, depending on our level of awareness. And it may be that the experience of beauty reminds us of something we already have inside, we just need to be reminded from time to time.
What beauty have you experienced recently?
What beauty might you find next?
If you’d like to train your ability to experience beauty more of the time (e.g., at work, in relationships, in daily activities that may have become “mundane”), there are a few days left to grab the offer below that I’m honored to be a part of. The Practical Meditation “Super Stack” is a compilation of courses and books from 25 teachers on the topic of meditation made practical and straightforward. My video course on How to ‘Be Present’ is included in the package and, if you’re interested for you or someone you care about, the whole thing is available for $49 until 6/29 (two more days).
Click here if you’d like to learn more👍🏻
