I’ve been thinking a lot about beauty over the last couple of days. It’s always been an important theme in my life.
When I recorded a Classical CD 20 years ago I called it ‘Letting Beauty Shine’ . It had a picture of some deep blue roses sitting in the middle of a child’s hands.
Beauty has always been more than skin deep for me…
It’s in the Eyes…
It’s in the timbre of a Voice…
It’s in the way they move…
It’s in the gentleness of their touch…
It’s in the Perfume of a Rose...
It’s in the wild abandon of laughter…
In a world that can be perceived as harsh and cruel it can be easy to lose sight of beauty. Of purity, of innocence.
My Singing has always been an antidote, an elixir, a medicine, a place of refuge, a place of remembering, a soft blanket to envelop myself in, to bring me back to beauty.
In Somatic Experiencing we talk about ‘Orienting to Pleasure’ – we’re hard wired to orient to danger.
For me orienting to beauty brings me so much pleasure. I had a Somatic Experiencing session the other day with a woman who also has a felt appreciation of beauty and I was drawn to work with her, even though she is on the other side of the world. I could sense that she ‘sees’ deeply, and sits comfortably beneath the surface.
The day after my session I walked into a store that had an aroma of Patchouli incense burning. It was minimalist, uncluttered, simple. Beautiful fabrics. A shop attendant dressed in a beautiful linen dress with long flowing dark hair and beautiful eyes.
I lingered, caught up in beauty that my eyes could feast on. I bought some Patchouli incense and came home and burned it during the day.
Philosophers have tried to give form to beauty over the centuries.
According to traditional Western thought from the antiquity through the Middle Ages, beauty is a constitutive element of the cosmos associated with order, harmony, and mathematics. Classical Philosophy treated and conceived beauty alongside truth, goodness, love, being, and the divine. In this concept, beauty is a supreme value, basic to the whole cosmos.
The ancient Greeks were concerned with understanding beauty, and how beauty can contribute to the highest good.
The Pythagorean connection between beauty and mathematics remains a touchstone of scientific thought to this day. It recognized that aesthetic experiences in arts such as music are closely tied to mathematical ratios of tones and rhythms.
A school of thought is that human souls are immortal. Every human being is born with implicit understanding of the Idea of beauty and all other Ideas. Upon entering into the body at birth, a human being temporarily "forgets" these Ideas and throughout her life course, she seeks to familiarize herself with these Ideas.
Maybe this why when we look at babies, we tend to only see how beautiful they are, innocent and pure.
I feel I’m at my most beauty-full when I’m either singing or laughing, both just a form of vibration. Both involve a certain purity, surrender and innocence. They move through me with abandon and bring me pleasure as well as others.
Sometimes it takes time to just linger and pause on the Voice that has no words…
Perhaps you can ‘intend’ to find that time today…
In beauty may we walk ….
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