All Things Beautiful

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” 
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” 
― Confucius

In a recent conversation with a client she remarked on my frequent use of the word "beautiful." Before I talk more about this word and what it means to me today a short story may be a good way to warm up.

When I was in fifth grade I was one of a small group of children in my class who had already started learning English two years earlier, in grade three. Everyone else had started just a few months earlier. Our homework assignment was to answer questions about a story we had read in chapter two of our book. i was bored with the questions and skipped on to the story in chapter three. I remember it to this day, the word "beautiful," how it stuck out of the first line of words (which I don't remember) and how I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know it's meaning, I didn't know how to pronounce it, I didn't know, didn't expect that a word with this combination of letters could exist--"e-a-u"…who had ever seen three vowels so close together? I turned to my father for help. Of course, he knew the word and taught me how to say it: bee-u-tee-ful. But what about the "a" I asked. I learned that the "a" is a silent vowel, that it rests there between the "e" and the "u" simply to remind us of the origin of the word in Old French, but more so to remind us of itself, its beauty. And if we pronounce the vowels slowly, one after the other, we might realize something else, something I noticed immediately after my father told me: saying the word and its vowels out loud and slowly opens our mouths in a particular way as if to ready us for beauty herself. Still some hesitation in the "e" but then followed by a surrender to open more in the "a" and then the powerful "u"pursing our lips as if in surprise, as if to inhale beauty itself. 

I was full of joy about this newfound word and all it stirred in me. And there was a kind of pride about my discovery. I couldn't wait to tell my English teacher, Herrn Boehmer,  about it. When, the next day, he walked from table to table to check our homework Herr Boehmer found my homework done quite sloppily. I didn't have an excuse, I knew this, but I told him about my discovery. Perhaps he thought I wanted to distract him from what I had not done. His response remains stuck in my head as one of the things we hear that create a particular kind of wound. A wound that doesn't heal but, over time, itself becomes beautiful:

"Martin, it would be better for you, I think, to concentrate on your homework rather than jumping ahead."

I was hurt. I was ashamed. There was very little left in me that could say "but the word 'beautiful' is still beautiful!" Could Herr Boehmer really not hear how that word is singing of itself, of beauty?

I am not sure, if I really had the same sense of beauty being everywhere then as I have now. Of course, the German "schoen" also just doesn't sound as good as does "beautiful." Although "schoen" with its central o-umlaut does approximate the sound of a moan or sigh, i.e., a visceral exclamation, much more closer than does "beautiful." Beautiful, viz. that something is full of beauty, points towards an almost mysterious kind of layered richness and depth.  And I see it everywhere. It gives me pause, it gives me peace, it gives me energy. Beauty is no longer just a superficial aesthetic. Rather it goes deep, towards the very core of things--of people, objects, music and art, nature and technology, science and religion, philosophy and psychology. Every time I encounter it I have an immediate sense of boundaries falling away; I am now connected to the very source of all being--without ever knowing what and where and who that source might be.

Seeing beauty is less an ability than it is a choice. It is a way of opening my senses, staying open, to the world as it comes to me, into me. Sometimes shockwave after shockwave of beauty comes through, accompanied only by silence or, sometimes, tears.

Can ugly things even exist next to all this beauty? Well, perhaps temporarily, for the time that I'm not really looking, not really perceiving. When I really begin to look and perceive ugliness seems to fall away.  Yes, it is true, there really is no room in this way of looking at the world for anything like evil. Evil is a "useful" category when we feel afraid, embattled or otherwise threatened. But arguably the notion of "evil" has never really helped anyone to feel less afraid, embattled or threatened. If anything I'd say it increases it.

Seeing beauty, even when we feel afraid, being fearless in the face of what we're told is ugly, is what can really help us live. And connect. And commune. And accept death.