Beauty Part IV – The Dark Side of Beauty

The Dark Side of Beauty

“In the shadowlands of pain and despair we find slow, dark beauty.”

John O’Donohue from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

It’s not that pain and despair are beautiful, but many times these things uncover the vulnerable and authentic places deep inside of us. We ordinarily keep those places tucked neatly inside when not stretched to the limit or stressed beyond our ability to cope. In times of ease we can go through the motions and not let those parts show. But when we are in pain, it just doesn’t work and those tender parts come out involuntarily. There is a stunning beauty to be found in authenticity during those times.

A little more than a decade ago I experienced a season of loss that shook me down to the core. The anchors of my life that I had come to depend on as stabilizing realities came unmoored. My world seemed at first nonsensical, then cruel, and finally, and perhaps most disturbing, totally and completely unengaging, having nothing to offer.

Because books have always been friends, even from childhood, I looked to them for some kind of solace. I was drawn to books about grief, several of which became counselors and confessors of sorts. They became a safe place for me to rant and rail, for me to stain their pages with tears and to clasp them to my breast in appreciation.

In Belden Lane’s book, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, I was counseled to embrace loss as an avenue to freedom from incessant grasping. As the early Desert Mothers and Fathers learned by experience, emptiness lays bare the greatest of treasures.

In Lanes’s Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality, I was tutored by Edward Abbey, who Lane referred to affectionately as a “desert rat with voracious curiosity.” Abbey’s desert insights include learning to live with paradox and with questions that have no answer. He seems to revel in the mystic nature of a desert landscape describing it as a wasteland and at the same time imbuing it with a sense of the sacred.

The Soul in Grief: Love, Death and Transformation by Robert Romanyshyn speaks of the subtle nuances of grief that include mourning, reverie, and a melancholy that embraces a larger cosmic story. As he invites us to walk with him through his own process of grief, his eloquence allows us to join him in parsing out these subtleties for our own understanding of the dark side of beauty.

Some of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met are refugee women. There is a clarity, like a brilliant diamond that shines through them as they tell their stories of escaping their village set ablaze by a warring group, running in terror with their child in their arms, or the tragic separation of daughter from older and infirmed mother, who is struggling to survive in a refugee camp, plagued with disease and lack of food. There is no subterfuge in their deep and piercing gaze, only an open unblinking beauty.

As O’Donohue points out in his book Beauty, “Often it takes a huge crisis of a trauma to crack the dead shell that has grown ever more solid around us. Painful as that can be, it does resurrect the longing of the neglected soul.”

I don’t believe that the refugee women I met ever had much of hard shell grown over their soul, but I know I have to be vigilant against hardness in my own.

What neglected part of your soul have you discovered in the dark side of beauty?

Writing Prompt for the Week: Cosmic Melancholy