High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘beauty’

It’s no accident, you know, that the world is filled with beauty, that we perceive it not only with our senses, but with our hearts and with our souls.  No randomness gives it birth; it’s the child of design, sent to reflect Perfection in time and space.

Beauty is the cosmic harmony of creation made comprehensible to human mind.  It’s the divine dance played in rhythms of color and sound to show us the pathway to joy.  It carries the sweetness of truth, the fragrance of goodness.  Beauty delights and inspires us and awakens in us the quest to know more completely the nature of its source, and its place within us.

With utmost grace, beauty weaves a wholeness of matter, spirit and mind, signaling to us the ultimate art, beckoning us to create it in our lives.  It’s a divine hint, a whisper, of how tenderly we’re loved, and an illumination of the way home.

Even as we celebrate our own joy, let us offer an invocation for all who have not yet found their paths to happiness.

May all who suffer undeserved pain
(for all pain is undeserved),
who unwittingly fall into strife
(for all strife is unwitting),
who wrestle with nightmare monsters
(for all evil is an unreal masquerade)
find comfort, healing and peace.

May all who suffer misery awaken.  May all who live with falsehood find truth.  May all hardness be met with mercy and all harshness be soothed by kind hands.

May those who are caught in arrogance be humbled. May those who think themselves low find their worth.  May those who are forgotten be recognized.  May the alienated find belonging and the lonely find friends.

May our darkness give way to light, our doubt be turned to faith, our fear to strength, and our confusion to understanding.  May we be touched by grace, opened to beauty, moved by goodness and surrendered to love.

For we all are children of the universe, of the illimitable, omnipresent Yes.  May we know its truth and dance in its glad song.

When the Grand Yes saturates every molecule of air, when it paints the world in every direction as far as you can see, when you hardly dare breathe lest you break its spell, surrender, and give thanks.

When beauty is so complete that it dissolves every lie ever told, when it dispels every last shred of arrogance and melts every memory of pain, when it tears away all but the awe and wonder of being, revealing to you the central truth of your heart, whisper your yes, and give thanks.

This is the moment that love wrote.  This is its gift and its joy, all for you, all for you.  Sink into it with gladness.  Drink of its splendor, and give thanks.

Just beyond the range of human hearing (except for the hearing of the heart), the song of beauty sings.  It rises from like breath from every curve and contour, every turn of color, every gentle bending of light.

It wafts up from the shining morning dew, from wavelets on the sea, from the unfolding of a flower’s petals, the flash of birds’ wings in flight.  It soars up from sunrises and sunsets, from moonlit sweeps of sand.

It takes its rhythm from the leaping of gazelles, the blinking of fireflies and eyelids, the rise and fall of breath from all that breathes, the surging of emotions through the human frame.

Whole choirs of angels work to record each moment’s song, preserving them all in albums that you can play, if you so choose, when you reach the seventeenth dimension.  And if you do, you’ll find each one evokes the image of the moment that produced it, filled with its particular fragrance and color and motion and with all the feelings of all the creatures on earth.  I’m told it makes former earth-beings weep, so beautiful is its sound.  “I never realized,” they say.  “I never knew.”

“We live only to discover beauty.  All else is a form of waiting.” ~Kahlil Gibran

When beauty spreads itself before you, pause and breathe it in.  Pause, setting aside your thoughts and your doings, and let it shower you with its radiant and animating light.  Let it sing to you its song of exaltation.  Let it flow molten into the depths of you, quickening your soul with its sparks of wonder, its flame of truth.

This is a mystical training.  For beauty’s purpose is to reflect to you the essence of the light within your own heart.  It is life, dancing naked before you, taking the form of a bird, a face, a leaf, a river, a sky.  And the more deeply you see it, the more you come to understand that you, too, are its child and its expression.

Immerse yourself in it.  Ride its tender waves to the edges of the cosmos, to the pure, still point within.  Let it guide and teach you.  “When you reach the heart of life,” the poet Gibran declared, “you shall find beauty in all things, even in the eyes that are blind to beauty.”  This is its ultimate lesson.  May it be your destiny and goal.

After the intensity of the workday—a short-staffed crew, a deluge of emergent demands—I greeted the rain with a sigh of relief.

Its soft patter on the sidewalk, the plunking of its fall into rippled puddles, the splooshing sound of passing cars all seemed like music.

I felt myself easing into its gentleness, expanding into the muted colors of the afternoon.

As I drove home, my windshield wipers kept time to the radio’s music and I noticed how the traffic lights streamed their reds and greens onto the wet road.  I thought of a comment I read once by an artist named Hundertwasser about how colors took on such a glow in the rain.  It was, he said, his favorite weather.

We don’t often think of rain as a cause for joy.  But this afternoon, I understood how Hundertwasser could feel the way he did about it.  It’s all in how you look at things, and what you want to find.

I wanted peace and release, and that’s exactly what the rain brought me.  As I stepped from the car in my driveway, I came face to face with a low branch of pine, its needles shimmering with raindrops that looked like pearls just plucked from the sea.   I stood for a moment, taking it all in, filled with the glow of serenity and quiet joy.

It’s all so beautiful, I thought, so perfect.

And so it is.

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When morning first dawned, the peony’s petals were still folded.  But as the sun sailed slowly across the sky, little by little the flower unfurled in a display of wondrous beauty, its heady perfume filling the warm air.

It was as if it could hold its potential within itself no longer.  All at once, it knew it was time to be what it was meant to be, to grace the world with all it had to give.

And today, the world is a more beautiful place, because one peony opened to the light.

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A squiggle of purple flowers on the cart caught my eye.  Maybe it was the intensity of the color, or the energetic waves of the petals, I don’t know.  But all of a sudden I felt as if I were seeing the world through the eyes of Vincent Van Gogh.  It all seemed so passionate and alive.

“How many ways can you paint a flower?” I wondered.  “Or an insect, or a bird, or a baby, or a tree?”    Think of the countless variety of colors, of shapes and sizes even one species comes in.  This is no cookie-cutter world we live in.  It’s a veritable banquet of sensual delights.

Think of all the colors the human eye can see, the range of sounds our ears can hear, the vast array of textures and pressures we perceive, the fragrances, the tastes.  The countless variations astound the mind.  And still, what we sense is only one small slice of what’s there.  Whole worlds dance outside our senses’ capacity to perceive them.

I read once that when we pass onto the next dimension, we acquire additional senses and so perceive an even more complex and intricate world.  And as we move through eternity, we gradually acquire greater and greater capacities to experience the magnificence of it all.  Then, after billions and billions of years and a sojourn that wends its way through universe after universe, we’re finally large enough and strong and pure enough to see it all, and to see that it’s always new, always changing and never ever ends.  And so we erupt into songs of  joy that flow endlessly through all creation.

The front desk called.  “Would you please unlock the playground?” Doris asked.  “The landscapers are here.”  I always love getting that call.  It gives me a chance to escape into the outdoors for a few minutes to breathe fresh air and hear the birds.

I had spotted the shrubbery behind the locked gate as I walked past it when I arrived for the day.  A row of waist-high bushes were sporting hundreds of globes of white blossoms that looked like fat popcorn balls.

I grabbed my camera from my purse as I headed out the door.  This was a chance to get my daily photo; it would be raining by the time I left for the day.

As I approached the bushes I saw that the blooms were a miniature hydrangea of some sort.  My eyes quickly swept across the panorama, waiting for just the right groupings of flowers and leaves to call me.  And when they did, I focused in close.

Suddenly I was engulfed in visions of delicate beauty and subtle hues.  “Just look at these! Look at these!” I said to myself as I composed my shots.  Each globe was actually a small bouquet, fit for the hand of a bride.  “How lovely!”

As much as I enjoy framing landscapes in my camera’s viewfinder, the close-in views move me the most.  Seeing the artistry in the smallest details, the harmony and balance and grace of the lines, the delicacy of petals, awes me.  Deep in the woods, or here, in a locked playground, where no one may ever see them or notice, are these masterpieces of living art.

They unfold in beauty regardless, following the dictates of grand cosmic laws that, in their perfection, render beauty in everything they bring into being.  Whether we see or notice it or not.

I quickly snap half a dozen shots and turn away.  My duties call.  But I am renewed now.  And when I walk into the clinic’s lobby all the faces I see are touching and beautiful.

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.For all moms everywhere, the true ones with strong wills and melting hearts, the ones who hold their babies close and let grown babies go, the ones who give up youth, leisure and sleep in the name of nurturing and guiding, the ones who trust instinct and some merciful god to whisper how, to show the way . . .

For their bravery and sacrifice, for their inventiveness and making do, for the wisdom they share, and the songs they sing, for all the long nights and sparkling mornings . . .

For their laughter and beauty, their playfulness and patience, their firm hands and gentle touch, for the traditions they pass on and the stories they tell, and most of all, for their light and endless unconditional love . . .

Our deepest gratitude, and golden flowers.

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