Beauty is not what you think
A long overdue post and a workshop series announcement
Greetings! Just before you head into the main post, I want to let you know about the Embodying the Seasons Workshop Series I’m leading online. The next one is Summer: Savouring the Glow on Saturday 21st June 10-12pm BST. In this workshop, I want to explore how we can bring our awareness to the ever-changing flux of experience, particularly how we do and don’t take notice of how much we’re shaping and impacting our lives.
Savouring the Glow is for anyone wanting to cultivate self-appreciation to land more deeply in their life to reinforce their everyday creativity and trust. The workshop will include Yoga, Meditation, Poetry and Pranayama and participant will have access to the downloadable recording after.
Meander
This has been something I’ve wanted to write for a long time, but the sentences always felt implanted and writing them a staccato effort. I think my seemingly little encounter with a Blumenwiese unlocked what was wanting to be said.
I was walking my dog, Ludwig, around Graz University’s grounds yesterday morning. I didn’t realise how grating the ambient building work was until I turned the corner and saw the Blumenwiese, the planted flower meadow, that’s been planted to promote pollination and bio-diversity. There was a compelling quality to my walk, as I met the poppies and other wildflowers. I softened, then realised I was smiling as the building work continued in earnest, yet it didn't matter as I stood with the Blumenwiese. In the moment there were no words, just sensations as we, the Blumenwiese and I, were enveloped in this ordinary scene.
As I write this, I’m struck by how this little unfolding event, no more than a few minutes long, is similar to everyday stresses and needing to seek out solace and expansion in the beautiful. When I write beautiful, I don’t mean the commodified and commercialised standards of beauty, but the beauty that brings us into a place where we can feel the bittersweet transience of the moment, and an innate appreciation for the grandeur that is passing. As I looked at the wild flowers, I could see some were beginning to die, that in a few weeks there’ll be fewer colours, instead a blanket of green dotted with odd flower will take over. Then I thought of winter, how just a few months ago I looked at the remnants on the seemingly lifeless patch of ground, and felt a mix of nostalgia for what was and an optimism for what was to come.
Time, which renders everything fragile in its impermanence and anti-fragile in its constancy, is deeply felt, so much so that for brief moments there is a step outside of time in the encounter with the beautiful.
I’m thinking of John O’Donohue’s invitation to keep something beautiful nearby as a way to loosen the knotted chronic stressing threads hemming us in, and losing touch with the bittersweet brilliance of everyday living.
When we perceive beauty, we don’t passively take in, feel pleasure then move on unchanged by the encounter. Beauty does not lie fundamentally in the object outside of us nor is it generated solely in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is what happens in the meeting between, the zwischenheit, changing the perceiver and the perceived.
I was drawn to the Blumenwiese not as an egoic “Now I’m going to create some wellbeing”, rather, the wildflowers were beckoning and I was reaching towards them without any sense of the purpose. Then came the perception, the awareness as I realised this meeting was changing my experience, the hitherto loud, sharp, grating one dimensional university ground becoming richer and nourishing. I became less tense and more soft. The contact with the Blumenwiese changed my perception not just of the outer environment but my inner one too. We co-created the experience. In every meeting, our perception of the outside - whether it’s a person, including ourselves, a thing, or a landscape - and inside are changed.
Being strictly, the first, last and only of its species, each sensation is a birth and a death.
Perception does not come to us as an event in the world, to which we can apply the category of causality, but rather as a re-creation or a re-construction of the world at every moment.
Merleau-Ponty
When I write meeting, I don’t mean the armoured kind that characterises so much of our interactions.To meet the outside truly, we have to sense, to allow in, and in the allowing in, we risk being changed, which can make a true meeting rare as so often we try to maintain a role, a feeling, a belief, all threads that offer a surface security but ultimately hem us in.
Body
Just as in meditation every moment of renewed attention is a chance to start anew, so it follows with the momentary sensual contact with the beautiful, which may be something on the outside, but lest we forget that beauty is also much closer to home than we realise.
Self experiencing body not as a disconnected machine to be commanded, but a cosmic, some might say divine, creation that is the culmination not just of one lifetime, but the lifetime of the universe itself. When we pay attention to how the muscles stretch and shorten, the sensation of joints turning, the lungs ceaselessly expanding and condensing, the sharpness of sorrow, the swelling of joy, without any agenda but to be the experience, we are in time and glancing beyond it.
Paying embodied attention is a bi-directional movement: the more we reach out and allow in, the more deeply we are connected to the force of life.
Body is always offering a meeting with bittersweet beauty. As are the wildflowers, as is the body of the Earth.
Wonder
The ancient Greek aisthesis means sensation, with aesthetics being knowledge through the senses. An-aesthetic, instead, is something, pharmaceutical product or a procedure which dulls the senses. Knowledge through the senses is a bottom-up process where ‘the brain is the last to know’ to use a phrase from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, there’s no observer analysing the event in a reflexive way. Rather, an aesthetic evaluation is how we feel as events unfold:
We cannot evaluate aesthetically without being involved in the object’s creation. There is no such thing, in this sense, as objects which are beautiful per se. There is only the experience of generating beauty in the presence of something which becomes a fount of beauty.
Gianni Francesetti
Lightly gaze at your body, or if you prefer, the body of loved one, or if you prefer, a tree or a flower or work of art that deeply touches you. You can also do this when practising Yoga or another introspective movement form. Allow for your eyes to absorb what is being seen, as a way to invite your external and internal senses to align with the intent of the moment. Notice that what you're looking at is also looking at you, you are being seen. Stay with how the moment is unfolding, the undulation and fluctuation of your internal landscape, no need to label anything just yet.
When the encounter organically passes, how do you feel? How aware are you of your wholeness rather than your parts? How did you experience time in the encounter?
Reflect
‘Beauty will save the world.’ - Dostoyevsky
In this quote, Dostoyevsky is speaking to the ancient trinity of good, truth, and beauty. Beauty can be a moment or a path illuminating our meaning, our truth that makes sense of and transforms pain into a goodness to be protected.
In encountering, co-creating and being altered by beauty, we cannot do this from the sidelines, rather there is a requirement of being touched as we touch, we have to directly experience - and all experience includes our senses - contact and have a commitment to such contact for beauty to occur.