Beauty Doesn’t Mean Light
It doesn’t mean soft colors and flowing cloth. It doesn’t mean that your hand reaches up and out so far that it lifts your feet off the ground. Beauty doesn’t separate you from the world. It doesn’t mean that you turn away from what’s most difficult to see.
Being oriented to what’s beautiful means that you’ve allowed the delicate folds of your inner ear to open to that smallest hum, even though you know it will lick your neck with sorrow on the way in. A gasp birthed in your chest, struck by a moment of fleeting awe, an ungraspable rapture. You’ve finally stopped being so vigilant against the stirring that feels like knives and balm both.
What is this beauty? When it isn’t just sunsets and children laughing, or flowers in a vase just so? What if it’s in the tentative, awkward dancing of those learning to return to their bodies? What if it’s a dying relative whose bright eyes express a fearless readiness to go? What if it's making a new choice after years of being stuck? What if it’s the untamed wild, the way skin feels on rough bark, the rich loamy soil covering the weed roots that I pull from the garden and inhale deeply?
To be touched by any of this means touching that place in you that remembers, always remembers the end of all things. The constant stream of endings. Beauty is not looking away from this. It is bringing your eye close enough to peer into the multi-colored moss and lichen on a long dead, rotting tree. It is the courageous seeing of life eating life. It is watching the mouse you just saved from a cat get scooped up by a hawk a moment later. You laugh. What else is there to do, when crying is the very same thing?
Beauty is a threaded story; a meaning weaved into life. Orienting to beauty does not mean a happy life. It means understanding that while happiness is a welcomed visitor, it won’t stay because it cannot. Your heart is a revolving door. Happiness is a visitor who knows its place. It bows down to grief, to longing. It kisses the feet of joy. It offers fruit to reverence and awe. It becomes the puppy we pat on the head, who we all love but we know will grow up soon.
Beauty is what happens when we let ourselves touch the absolute reality of transience. It is a presence where we silently pray our endless hellos and goodbyes. It is arriving in the place where you no longer know who you are. It will bring you to your knees if you let it.
Beauty does not have to be the sun and the moon. It can be the cave, the black hole, the hot-fired womb of the Earth where all things are churned. It can be what reminds you that life is here. And life is something you can touch– if you’re brave enough.
Simple. Yet I can think of nothing at all more difficult.