Beauty Part III – Knowing, Being, Doing

Blue Marble

Beauty is “a threshold which holds the real and the ideal in connection and conversation with each other.” This phenomenon, according to John O’Donohue in his book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, is not a philosophical one, rather it is a luminous, even numinous encounter.

An encounter with beauty is a moment, often a fleeting moment in which we engage the conversation between the real and the ideal, and it takes our breath away. The encounter leaves us changed. It’s not so much that we come to understand something outside of ourselves differently, although that is certainly the case, more importantly, we become someone we were not before. We now experience being differently. And this way of being is the result of a distinct kind of knowing.

When we experience the beauty of falling in love, it’s as though we have an intimate insight into our beloved’s inner treasure. Our union with the beauty of that treasure changes our “beingness”, a “beingness” that wraps itself around our “DNA” as it were.

We experience many kinds of “falling in love” in the presence of beauty. When the astronauts saw the earth from space for the first they were changed. The Ohhh…that they experienced signaled a kind of knowing that was far beyond coming to an understanding. It seems to have evoked a reverence of relationship with their home planet, something they didn’t know before, something that affected their being.

“There it was, shining like a jewel in a black sky. I looked at it in wonderment, suddenly aware of how its uniqueness is stamped in every atom of my body…”

Astronaut Mike Collins

From “On seeing the Earth for the first time” at thespacereview.com

“As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.”

Astronaut James B. Irwin

From “Short Inspirational Quotes” at spacequotations.com

“For me it was an epiphany in slow motion…It’s a profound sense of empathy, a profound sense of community, and a willingness to forgo immediate gratification and take a more multi-generational outlook on progress.”

“From space, the planet is a constantly changing masterpiece and the sheer beauty is absolutely breathtaking. It looks like a shining jewel and you realize that it’s home to everyone who ever lived and everyone who ever will be…”

Astronaut Ron Garan

From “Scientists attempt to recreate ‘Overview effect’ from Earth at theguardian.com

Garan went on in the same article to say, “…another thing that hit me was a sobering contradiction between the beauty of our planet and the unfortunate realities of life on our planet. It filled me with a sense of injustice. It infuriated me.”

After returning home, he became an author. He wrote a book that is a call to action, The Orbital Perspective, in which he reveals how his experience of seeing Earth from space brought an insight he now lives by, “…humans, when they set aside their differences and work together, can do anything.

Other astronauts translated their “beingness” into doing by becoming philanthropists, artists, poets – acknowledging that their encounter with beauty changed them and changed the choices they made about how they live.

What conversation are you engaged in between the real and the ideal?

Writing Prompt for the Week: Knowing, being, doing in my life