The Briar Philosopher - Finding Beauty

“You will never understand beauty until you learn to see what is actually there.” ~Jiddu Krishnamurti

So, what was he talking about? What does that mean “What is actually there?” Of course, I see what is there. Right? Well, maybe not. 

We, you, me, and everybody has a tendency to see the world through the filter of our culture and our culture goes to all kinds of trouble to tell us what is beautiful and what is not. The message is everywhere we look. The definition of what is beautiful and what is not is spoon-fed to us from the time we first open our eyes. We filter the world through those definitions and so maybe we can’t really understand what is beautiful because maybe we aren’t really seeing what is actually there. 

This all came home to me yesterday while I was out clearing some of this year's flower beds of the standing stalks still left from the summer’s growth.  After the blooming season a few large “weeds” had grown up and their dried stalks and branches were still standing. The angle of the sun caught them just right and they seemed to be glowing. It struck me then how beautiful they were. I removed the large ones and broke up the small ones to add humus to the soil and continued to clear the bed. I noticed as I did so that the standing dead flower and weed stalks had caught a great number of leaves as they blew by this fall, also adding humus to the soil. It wasn’t a warm day but was well above freezing so, as I pulled up some old weeds, I caught the smell of rich living soil. It was such a welcome scent this time of year that I bent down and got a handful and brought it closer to my face to better enjoy the smell.  As I did so I was struck by the beauty of it all and in a flash I understood that it is only our minds that keep us from understanding that beauty is always with us. It was then that I also understood that there is no death, only change. What I had been looking at, all the dead stalks and seed heads, dead leaves and jumbled sticks and twigs, all of that was life and all of that was beautiful. The scent of the living bacteria in the soil was the smell of renewal. Those little microbes were busy with the business of transforming one season’s fallen beauty into the beauty that will grace another season and that, in and of itself, is a beautiful thing. Now, we are told that growth and life and blooming flowers are beautiful and that death and change and wilted flowers and empty branches are ugly. We are told that youth is beautiful and age is ugly, that there is less value in things that have lost the blush of summer. We are told that about the things that surround us and we are told that about ourselves. We have been told these things and none of these things are true. 

It is very difficult to step outside of what the world has told us to see, think, feel and believe about beauty. It is hard to look in the mirror or out the window and not find ourselves judging what our eyes behold along the lines of our cultural biases. We look out the window on a winter day and see gray skies and bare limbs against the sky and we think, “how dreary and ugly a day this is.” We look in the mirror now that youth has passed us and think, “how dreary and ugly I am after all these years.” 

And those thoughts color our days and bring us sorrow. But it needn’t be that way. 

The world around us changes from season to season and we ourselves change from season to season but there is always beauty to be found within that change. There is always the scent of renewal and there is always life stirring, moving, waiting.  Life and resurrection; that is what is actually there and that, whatever color or season it may be wearing at any given time, is a beautiful thing.