Beauty Part I – Choosing

Beauty - The Song of Salvation

It’s been easy up til now to write posts for this blog, well not easy, definitely not easy, but easy in comparison to trying to write now. Now it feels impossible. Now we live in a world turned upside down. How do you write about that…

I’ve been writing catch-up posts for quite a while, at least a month, just catching up with posts that should have been done weeks ago. Back then, I was able to choose my topic, write about anything. I could pretend to my writing-self that COVID-19 hadn’t really happened yet. But now I’m writing for March, the month that things start to unravel. No more pretending.

And as always, with any kind of communication, genuineness is key. So I’ll just say it, I’m genuinely scared. As my mom used to say, “scared shitless.” I’m prone to anxiety to begin with, and so coping with this virus is way outside my comfort zone. My normal path to bliss, the morning routine of meditation, body work and writing that keeps me even keeled are stretched beyond their capacity and I’m forced to move into some new territory in my interior space.

Actually I’m just circling back to some things that I already know to be true, coming home to them, like a reunion, strengthening old ties and renewing old bonds. One of those things is Beauty. In the introduction to his book, Beauty, John O’Donohue quotes Herman Broch’s The Death of Virgil. The piece intimates that the “dream-wish of all art” and we can infer, all beauty, is for the world “to receive the song and its salvation.”

Beauty may be my salvation right now. O’Donohue draws the conclusion quite convincingly that beauty evokes courage, courage sparks hope and hope opens new pathways. That’s what we need, I think, new pathways, new ways of being and living. In some ways we are already being forced onto new pathways. In addition I want to advocate for volitional changes that are born of beauty, the deep kind, the kind we see in the miracles of nature, in a child’s wonder and in kindness amidst difficulty.

I’ve seen it in drive-by birthday parties and in retired nurses going back to work to the front lines in the fight against the virus. I’ve seen it in couples treasuring one another and in families making space in their homes for new expressions of creativity and I’ve seen it in the way we add value and meaning to our virtual connections that have become so vital to just living life.

What if we channel our pent-upness, both literal and figurative into an ongoing flow of “songs” of beauty. What if all over the world we adapt in ways that leave off the “ugly” that is always trying to encroach into our lives and instead turn full-faced to the beautiful that we so often do not see.

In his book, O’Donohue reminds us, “Sadly, whether from resentment, fear or blindness, beauty is often refused, repudiated or cut down to the size of our timid perceptions. The tragedy is that what we refuse to attend to cannot reach us.”

What is trying to reach you? What will you attend to?

Writing Prompt for the Week: Choosing Beauty