Hello y’all,
I am still traversing the territory of covid brain fog, so I feel honored and grateful to have a place to channel my focus through sweetness to you today in this piece I’ve been writing in my mind for months. I would love to hear from you in the comments below where beauty is finding you, inviting you, receiving you.
Til next time, with deep love,
Rach
timeless photos from the road many moons ago
"Let the beauty we love be what we do."
These precious words of Rumi’s play like a meditative metronome in my mind on the days I feel softened and receptive to the reliable rhythms of real reality. Not the fabricated one that screams at us to buy, sell, strive, strain, rush, perform, perfect – but the one that flows like an underground river that surfaces in delicious springs and dances in the sunlight with glittering possibility, delivering a steady and vitalizing connection to source. I kneel down and cup my palms to drink from these waters, and I let what’s artificial fall away to remember what's true.
What is life in its essence, beneath the fray? What does it sound like? Taste like? How does it show us that it's here? How do we stay attuned, when "reality" distracts us with a million superficial, shiny objects to architect its own illusion?
I've pondered this brief refrain for years. It makes me soul ache in the most exquisite way. It sparks my cells alive.
Let the beauty
we love
be
what
we do.
I think about the potency of the word beauty. How it creates a completely different world with its inclusion. Rumi could have said "let what we love be what we do", but the spirit-stirring wisdom is lost without invoking beauty. If simply guided to let what we love be what we do, could we be deluded by love's shadowed imposters that lunge at us like hungry ghosts – infatuation or lust or greed? Could we be certain that it is love, not ego, that is guiding our doing if not wrapped in the wings of beauty? Could love be elevated, embodied, and expressed into its full promise without beauty? What would the world look like if we asked ourselves: is what we're doing the beauty we love? And what about the word “let”, asking us to receive and give from a place of surrender as an antidote to a world organized around pressure and force?
Few have shaped my thinking on beauty as profoundly as the late Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue, who considered beauty as a (if not the) human calling, which he spoke to profoundly in this OnBeing episode I return to regularly. O'Donohue lived his life in devotion to the study of beauty, even writing a gorgeous text on the subject called "Beauty: The Invisible Embrace". One of my favorite excerpts speaks to the practiced intentionality of walking the beauty way:
“What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation. When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.”
Here O'Donohue invokes the spring of life rising to the surface to refresh us with what it truly means to be alive in this sensual, sensuous, sensitive body that is really a vessel where perception is transformed into electricity.
In a world guided by beauty, would conspicuous consumption be re-membered as adornment and nesting? Would real estate be transmuted into homecoming and placemaking? Would fast food drive-thru's be reconstituted into slow-savored, settled sustenance? Would education systems by re-imagined from conditioning, control, and complacency into cultivation of an animated, ensouled, curious relationship with learning? To live in collective beauty, the possibilities are endless.
I wonder what it would mean for us as a species to peel back every last layer that weighs thick and toxic over the gift it is to live life on a planet overflowing with abundance available to us once we can root into enoughness. As we heal survival mechanisms of scarcity, we can recognize that we were never exiled from the Garden of Eden on offer to us all the time for us to share, growing and flowing prolifically, hinting at us with the irresistible flirtations of a billion flowers. They bat their petaled lashes as they lift their gaze to meet ours, drawing us in like bees to sip sweet nectar and make honey with our lives, to be the beauty we love, to be love itself, to be the flower whose sheer presence brightens the world as an offering.
It is important to remember that this manufactured reality thrives on pumping a toxic haze of perpetual ugliness into our atmosphere, where beauty feels far and therefore our souls feel lost under the cloud of unyielding doom and gloom. Modernity’s madness has made this task more challenging, but that doesn’t mean we must work harder, for that would simply perpetuate the paradigm that insists we struggle to survive existence. This lie itself must be dissolved, and we’re not meant to do it alone. Rumi invites us to receive real reality beyond what we think of as life and to allow ourselves to be amongst a wide “we” that commits our prayers of beauty to one another. O’Donohue guides us to penetrate the filters and incinerate the veils and relink ourselves to ancient lifeways that understood beauty as a practice, a preparation, a ritual, a rite. These are wayshowers that guide us both backward and forward, out of the deception that denies us this birthright of beauty.
“We respond with joy to the call of beauty because in an instant it can awaken under the layers of the heart a forgotten brightness. Plato said: 'Beauty was ours in all its brightness...Whole were we who celebrated that festival' (Phaedrus).”
-John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
It is our calling to celebrate this festival of beauty while we're here. To behold and be held in our beauty in perfect exchange, and spark a ripple effect of change.
I’m drawn to Nina Simone to close this piece. These concepts – love, beauty, freedom – exceed us on purpose, but ultimately, to be love is to live with no fear. For, “fearlessness is what love seeks,” as Hannah Arendt wrote, drawing on millennias of Buddhist teachings. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”
May we enter into this garden of fearlessness, of infinite and eternal love. May we build our reality on beauty, kneeling down to receive the sourcespring and drink our spirits into brightness, for you, for me, for we.
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impressed by what you're capable of creating despite covid brain fog. definitely doesn't seem that way from the readers' side. <3