This is the simplest of practices: Discover 5 points of Beauty in each day. It is a testament and an expression of gratitude for the gift of life to live this special day. I attempt to do this practice, not always successfully, whether the day is “good” or “bad,” dull or exciting; especially when I am “busy.” Busyness can be magnet and a cloak over our awareness, taking us away from the wonder of what is happening on the “outside.”
Practice
- The first step is to form the Intention to capture 5 Beauty points today!
- A Beauty Point can be very simple like visiting Mt. Ko, in the previous Practice on Synchronicity; it is most often nothing special. Simply breathing fresh air, or listening to the rain, or enjoying silence, or watching butterflies frolic, or holding a cup of hot tea, or having lunch with a loved one. As Shakespeare observed, “The world is your oyster.”)
- You will know when you encounter a special Beauty point. It will speak to you.
- You may enjoy taking a “Heart/Mind snapshot” of a Beauty Point. It will resonate in a special frequency in your Heart/Mind.
- I have found a cell phone camera to be a useful tool to capture these special moments.
- At times you can use them as sources of inspiration, as you can see from the image for this Practice I created after a bike ride along by the seashore in Santa Barbara one evening.
- There is a poignant quality about Beauty Points, as they also remind us of the transience of our life. There is a beautiful haiku by the Japanese poet, Issa, that captures this sense:
“This dewdrop world,
is a dewdrop world,
and yet…”
What if the space for Beauty in our lives—its “market share” of our attention–suddenly starts to expand? What might be the implications of this phenomenon?
If we ponder this notion for a moment, we may discover that the practice of cultivating resilience through an appreciation of the Beautiful can unfold in very much the same way. Even what we are accustomed to perceive as ugly, or as flaws, can reveal elements and enhance the Beautiful. And as we open ourselves to look for the Beautiful in every moment, resilience naturally comes to us, and we are restored.
Welcome to Module 7— Discovering Beauty. I’m Julian Gresser. This is one of my favorite modules. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Discovering Beauty begins with Silence.
Silence
There is a remarkable passage in Beryl Markham’s West with the Night where she describes the different kinds of silences of her childhood in Kenya in the early year years of the 20th century:
“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is a silence after a rainstorm and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt, and there’s a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that is answered to the need of man for pleasures or for work. This kind of silence may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.”
Beauty presents an opportunity in a brief moment of time to forget ourselves and the busy world. We simply allow ourselves to melt.
Koan
Here is illustration from long ago, Case 12 in the Transmission of Light—Lingyun and the Peach Blossoms:
Lingyun was wandering in the mountains and became lost in his walking. He rounded a bend and saw peach blossoms on the other side of the valley. This sight awakened him and he wrote this poem:
“For thirty years I searched for a master swordsman,
how many times did the leaves fall,
and the branches burst into bud?
But from the moment I saw the peach blossoms,
I’ve had no doubts.”
Later, Keizan, a Japanese teacher, wrote:
“The village peach blossoms didn’t know their own pinkness
but still they freed Lingyun from all his doubts.”
In other words, the peach blossoms were perfect in themselves—unself-consciously—just as they are.
And then there is this poem by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. It is called Postscript.
“And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”
And here is another offering, an aria, Softly Sweet in Lydian Measures, from Handel’s Alexander’s Feast, sung by the late soprano Aileen Auger. The audio takes 4 minutes and 17 seconds. A small time to change pace and pause in our busy-ness, as our life flashes by.
You will find many more examples of such stunning Beauty (See Move # 3) in the Laughing Heart online book.
So, in very practical terms how will the exploration and the experience of Beauty deepen our resilience? Here is what I have discovered over many years:
- First, and foremost, Beauty allows us to pause in our busyness and enter another timeless world… to linger there… and to refresh and re-create ourselves.
- Beauty can provide solace, inspiration, and hope, and in this sense, resilience itself can be seen as a form of Beauty.
- Beauty can be a symbol of hope and optimism, especially during our troubles, because Beauty reminds us that there is still goodness and positivity in the world.
- Recognizing and appreciating Beauty within diversity, whether in people, cultures, or perspectives, enlarges our perspective and promotes resilience by fostering a sense of connection and belonging.
- And discovering Beauty in Nature—which is everywhere—helps to cleanse and to refresh our souls, with balance, harmony, and gratefulness.
Socrates on Beauty
Socrates,among the wisest of all men thought deeply about Beauty, Love, and Resilience. He wrote:
“Love and Beauty are intricately connected because love is the recognition and pursuit of the good, and beauty is a reflection of that goodness. Love is the force that draws us toward beauty, and beauty is the ideal that inspires our love.”
“This Form of Beauty is unchanging and eternal, and it is the ultimate object of love for those who seek wisdom and truth. When we encounter beauty in the world—whether in a work of art, the face of our beloved, or the order and harmony of nature—we catch a glimpse of this higher reality. Our souls are stirred, and we are drawn towards the beauty we perceive, for it reminds us of the divine and the perfect.”
“Love and beauty are thus intertwined in a profound and philosophical dance. Love is the force that draws us towards the beautiful, whether in the physical world or the realm of ideas, and beauty is the mirror that reflects back to us the divine and the perfect.”
To understand these things, we must embark on a lifelong journey of self-discovery and contemplation, for therein lies the truest wisdom and the highest form of love.
Conclusion
I would like to conclude with a curious encounter whose memory I have carried with me for over 30 years. It happened in a casual conversation over lunch in Tokyo with Masamichi Yamada, the son of my Zen teacher Koun Yamada. Masamichi today is carrying on his family’s tradition, and he is the abbot of the Sanun (3 clouds) Zendo where I practiced in Kamakura, Japan. At the time of our meeting, he was a senior Vice President at the Mitsubishi Bank and a graduate of Harvard Business School. He was remarking on the process of deepening as we practice the Great Koan “MU,” or absolute spacious-vastness. In all seriousness he remarked, “You know, in the beginning of practice the market share of MU is very modest, but then as we go deeper, MU’s market share expands. And if we’re lucky, MU gains dominant market share.”
As a Mitsubishi banker, his MU life and his business life were so fused, he scarcely noted the humor in what he was saying. But I have found it to be true—as I continue my practice—the sense of spaciousness, vast emptiness in each moment of time, however small, opens. The same applies to Beauty. In the beginning we reserve a narrow range of things and moments for what we deem “beautiful.” But if we ponder this notion for a moment, we may discover that the practice of cultivating resilience through an appreciation of the Beautiful can unfold in very much the same way. Even what we are accustomed to perceive as ugly, or as flaws, can reveal elements and enhance the Beautiful. And as we open ourselves to look for the Beautiful in every moment, resilience naturally comes to us, and we are restored.
In sum, the cultivation of resilience can be viewed as an continuous opening to seeing Beauty in the world—not only in Nature and creative works, where it stuns our eyes, but in more subtle ways, even in flaws and imperfections. Beauty has its own energy, its own vector, so to speak, and it is just waiting for us to discover this life force within ourselves.
Evolutionary Conversation—Discovery Questions
- What if the “market share” Beauty in our lives doubles each month?
- What if it can continue to do?
- How might this strange phenomenon become a source of comfort, joy, and resilience?
Exercises
- If you possess a smartphone with a camera, or if you have a camera, go out into the world, and wherever you are struck by something beautiful, capture it in that fleeting moment; then reflect, enjoy it, and share it with your comrades in this course.
- See if you can discover 3 Beauty Points each day. They will enable you to re-member, to connect and reassemble these precious moments in your vanishing life.