In the world of today, with news stations on a 24-hour cycle competing for our attention, and showing us all the ways the world is getting uglier and uglier, I find I need to seek out beauty even more. I must intentionally find and seek beauty and focus on it like my life depends on it.
Beauty feeds my heart – the seeking of beauty in the world, whether it be in the arts or sciences, nature, humor, the kindnesses still possible between ordinary humans, or the written word in all its glory – literature, poetry, prose.
Beauty puts me back together again when I am pulled and torn in pieces, raggedy and frail. Searching for – holding in the palm of my hand, or the center of my being, my ever-beating heart – the beauty below the surface. This knits me back in place and holds my heart together to go out there and be kind and lovely to those around me for one more day.
It takes a concerted effort. Oh – the effort of an entire concert orchestra, all in tune, all on pitch, all following the conductor’s lead, working together in tempo to create beauty. It takes this sort of grand effort of all my various parts – my mind, my intention, my pacing – not too fast and edgy – nice and slow – to keep focus on the beauty for the day.
And the thing is, because seeking beauty has been part of my practice for a while, it starts to happen naturally. I start to breathe in beauty in small, everyday occurrences. I am more alert to them in my surroundings. I have a poet’s heart. My early years were looking down a hole and lost in morasse and darkness, woe is me. I had losses and pains to work through, and finding my way to the page helped me sort that out so that I could find myself again, my happy, lovely, wonderful self who wanted to live and find beauty.
Years of spiraling downward quickly over a hurt taught me to grasp at straws if I had to – to find something beautiful to hold onto, to keep from slipping down that slope into misery. I would picture having already fallen off the cliff, and holding onto a strong branch sticking out to stop my fall, and I had to hold on for dear life. That is how much I have had to grasp and claw to get back up to the solid ground again at times.
So seeking beauty is not just something I do for fun and giggles. It is for my soul health. It is for sanity when I feel like I am teetering. And it is for calm in a world on the verge of chaos. May my heart always be a place for stillness and beauty and focus. It takes a concerted effort.
