cultivating beauty
Why is Beauty an important and essential component of our everyday 21st century life, particularly when we have everything at our fingertips?
That is precisely why. We live in an age of distraction and information overload. For most of us, we live life in front of a screen. We wake up and check our messages and emails, head to work with our heads in our phone, enter our cubicles to sit in front of our computer screens all day, and finally head home, heads still in our phones, to sit in front of our laptops or television screens all evening. Often, our daily experience is a virtual one, lacking depth, substance and feeling. And our senses are completely shut down.
So what place has beauty in all this?
Beauty recharges the soul and the body allowing the superfluous, the trivial and the superficial to fall away. And in doing so, it gives us perspective and a context in which to inhabit our life.
What if Beauty were not this “lofty thing” pondered and debated by philosophers, poets, artists and aesthetes, but an active presence that is everywhere at all times, yet most of the time, we just don’t see it or hear it or touch it or taste it or feel it. Beauty is not an abstract concept; it is an active experience that fully engages our senses and enriches our lives. It evokes a response in the deep recesses of our soul and is the antidote to the ugly and mediocre. It disempowers the negative and is the antidote to violence in all its forms. But if we never lift our eyes and step away from our screens, we can’t possibly be touched by it. Beauty is a deeply sensuous experience, igniting and awakening what lies dormant; stirring up appreciation, gratitude, and joy; evoking awe, magic and mystery. Beauty momentarily stops us in our tracks, gives us pause and shifts our energy. Our experience of it is directly connected to our level of intimacy with life. And so with daily cultivation and infusions of beauty, we are much less likely to find ourselves numbly slogging through the drudge and drone of our daily routines or zoned out in front of 24 hour news cycles.
Beauty is in the details. And the richness of our lives is in the details.
We will explore ways of seeing; how we see and what we choose to see.
How do we engage our senses and why is that important? What would our life look like with daily infusions of Beauty? How would it make us feel? How would our life (and we) be transformed?
