Being together with Beauty
Dear All,
I share these words with you in love, in the hope that they may serve as a loving and gentle reminder to remember what is truly important in life, in your life.
A few days ago I walked to the nearby river to sit by the water in the mild and still pleasant morning sun. The water cabled quietly against the low boulders that separate shore and water, golden twinkles danced in the water, as if they sang of times that belong to the most colourful of tales. My attention was gently beckoned by a feather from one of the many winged and feathered friends that usually make their resting place there. It was a single feather, still in perfect form, lying very tenderly in the middle of a shallow pool of water surrounded by the strong stones and chunky boulders. Steeped in pure beauty, a moment when land and sky converged, when depth and shallowness met and the entire creation seemed to be confined to this single shallow pool of water. A moment so harmonious that you wonder if it can ever be this beautiful again? It was a moment when I was allowed to be with beauty.
As I sat there at the water's edge and was allowed to see this, I realised that I was by no means alone but was accompanied by beauty, I was together with beauty in an intimate moment of being together. A moment that could disappear again with the same wing beat from which the feather originally came, but it was there, it was allowed to unfold and I had the profound pleasure of being a beholder of it. What a true blessing on a Sunday morning. It is these kinds of wonderful moments that unfold at all times, but the question is whether we can make ourselves present for them? Can we focus our attention on a single leaf leaving the treetops, on a new-born mother tending her lamb or calf, on the water slightly heaving to and fro? It is moments like this that are always abundant, but the question remains whether we can be together with them? Can we be intimate with beauty when we become aware that we are in her presence? Will we be able to stay with it without taking our attention away from it, without letting it evaporate or quickly posting it on social media? Can we keep it intimate by being with it? Quite a question but actually, deep down quite an invitation.
“Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.”
Beauty belongs to the deepest core of existence, you could even argue that the essence of life is pure beauty and that in the heart it knows nothing else. All other designations, opinions or ideas are concepts we make of it and keep ourselves from meeting it in beauty. Beauty has no counterpart, it only knows beauty, the counterpart is only known to us in our own formulated beliefs about what does and does not belong to beauty. Even my writing, the words I am now addressing to you are a concept, are an attempt to capture something in a form but at its core it can never embody the moment I am so carefully trying to point to. Words such as these "point" to something, they point to meaning but they are not the meaning. Words open the door for you to enter, but all it can lead you to is the experience of life itself; which can be experienced in your presence.
My writing to you is pointing to a memory of a single moment lived in full presence, which I hope may serve as a reminder to all of us that the beauty that is omnipresent requires us to be with her in presence. I'd like to leave it at that, hoping that when you're reading this you'll turn off your computer, put your phone away, and go out and explore how you can be with beauty.
In love and reverence, sven
