Opening eyes to nature’s beauty by John Muir

Fresh beauty opens one’s eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common everyday beauty.
John Muir

What Beauty looks like by George Eliot

There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.
George Eliot, Adam Bede

To love the beauty of the world in a human being by Simon Weil

Love that gives itself to the spectacle of the heavens, the plains, the sea, the mountains or the silence of nature senses this love in a thousand faint sounds, breaths of wind and the warmth of the sun. Every human being feels it vaguely for at least a moment. It is an incomplete love, sorrowful, because it gives itself to something incapable of response, which is matter. People desire to transfer this love onto a being that is like it, capable of responding to love, of saying ‘yes,’ of yielding to it.

The feeling of beauty sometimes linked to the appearance of a human being makes this transfer possible at least in an illusory way. But it is the beauty of the world — the universal beauty — toward which our desire leads. This kind of transfer is expressed in all literature that encompasses love, from the most ancient and most used metaphors and similes of poetry to the subtle analysis of Proust. The desire to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the desire for the Incarnation. If we think it is something else,we are mistaken.The Incarnation alone can satisfy it.
Simon Weil, Waiting for God

John O’donohue:Meditations for inspiration and reflection on Spirituality ,Yearning to belong,Beauty,Friendship ,love & Blessing

Music:
André Rieu-Un Amour D’été (A Summer Love)

From “A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted”
John O’Donohue

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.

More often than not it is the inner beauty of heart and mind that illuminates the face. A smile can completely transform the face. Ultimately, it is the soul that makes the face beautiful. Each face is it’s own landscape and is quietly vibrant with the invisible textures of memory, story, dream, need, want, and gift that make up the beauty of the individual life. This is also the grace that love brings into one’s life. As the soul can render the face luminous so too can love turn up the hidden light within a person’s life. Love changes the way we see ourselves and others. We feel beautiful when we are loved.
John o’donohue,Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

In everyone’s life there is a great need for an Anam Cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of acquaintance fall away. You can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul.

In the desolate and torn terrain of suffering, there is no beauty that reaches deeper than the beauty of the healing voice.The ability to care is the hallmark of the human, the touchstone of morality and the ground of holiness.
John O’Donohue,From The Anam Cara”The soul Friend”.

Within us and around us there is an invisible world
John O’Donohue,From Eternal Echoes

Within us and around us there is an invisible world; this is where each of us comes from… When you cross over from the invisible into this physical world, you bring with you a sense of belonging to the invisible that you can never lose or finally cancel…

You know your real life is happening here. Yet your longing for the invisible is never stilled. There is always some magnet that draws your eyes to the horizon or invites you to explore behind things and seek out the concealed depths…

When you enter the world, you come to live on the threshold between the visible and the invisible.

This tension infuses your life with longing. Now you belong fully neither to the visible nor to the invisible. This is precisely what kindles and rekindles all your longing and your hunger to belong. You are both artist and pilgrim of the threshold.

Let us begin to learn how to bless one another
John O’Donohue
From “To bless the space between us”

The word blessing evokes a sense of warmth and protection; it suggests that no life is alone or unreachable. Each life is clothed in raiment of spirit that secretly links it to everything else. Though suffering and chaos befall us, they can never quench that inner light of providence…

A blessing is not a sentiment or a question; it is a gracious invocation where the human heart pleads with the divine heart. . . . When a blessing is invoked, it changes the atmosphere. Some of the plenitude flows into our hearts from the invisible neighborhood of loving kindness.

In the light and reverence of blessing, a person or situation becomes illuminated in a completely new way. In a dead wall a new window opens, in dense darkness a path starts to glimmer, and into a broken heart healing falls like morning dew.

There is a quiet light that shines in every heart…It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing.

Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing.

We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us. The gift of the world is our first blessing.

The Sense Of Beauty By George Santayana

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
George Santayana,The Sense of Beauty

Before the Throne of Beauty by Khalil Gibran

Music:
El Manor-John Sokoloff

Before the Throne of Beauty

Khalil Gibran

One heavy day I ran away from the grim face of society and the dizzying clamor of the city and directed my weary step to the spacious alley.I pursued the beckoning course of the rivulet and the musical sounds of the birds until I reached a lonely spot where the flowing branches of the trees prevented the sun from the touching the earth.

I stood there,and it was entertaining to my soul-my thirsty soul who had seen naught but the mirage of life instead of its sweetness.

I was engrossed deeply in thought and my spirits were sailing the firmament when a hour,wearing a sprig of grapevine that covered part of her naked body,and a wreath of poppies about her golden hair,suddenly appeared to me.As she realized my astonishment, she greeted me saying,”Fear me not;I am the Nymph of the Jungle.”

“How can beauty like yours be committed to live in this place? Please tell me who your are,and whence you come?” I asked. She sat gracefully on the green grass and responded,”I am the symbol of nature! I am the ever virgin your forefathers worshipped, and to my honor they erected shrines and temples at Baalbek and Jbeil.”

And I dared say, “But those temples and shrines were laid waste and the bones of my adoring ancestors became a part of the earth;nothing was left to commemorate their goddess save a pitiful few and the forgotten pages in the book of history.”

She replied,”Some goddesses live in the lives of their worshippers and die in their deaths,while some live an eternal and infinite life.My life is sustained by the world of beauty which you will see where ever you rest your eyes,and this beauty is nature itself;it is the beginning of the shepherds joy among the hills,and a villagers happiness in the fields,and the pleasure of the awe filled tribes between the mountains and the plains.This Beauty promotes the wise into the throne the truth.”

Then I said,”Beauty is a terrible power!” And she retorted, “Human beings fear all things,even yourselves.
You fear heaven,the source of spiritual peace;
you fear nature,the haven of rest and tranquility;
you fear the God of goodness and accuse him of anger,while he is full of love and mercy.”

After a deep silence,mingled with sweet dreams,
I asked,”Speak to me of that beauty which the people interpret and define,each one according to his own conception;I have seen her honored and worshipped in different ways and manners.”

She answered,”Beauty is that which attracts your soul, and that which loves to give and not to receive.
When you meet Beauty,you feel that the hands deep within your inner self are stretched forth to bring her into the domain of your heart.

It is the magnificence combined of sorrow and joy;
it is the Unseen which you see,and the Vague which you understand,and the Mute which you hear-
it is the Holy of Holies that begins in yourself and ends vastly beyond your earthly imagination.”

Then the Nymph of the Jungle approached me and laid her scented hands upon my eyes.And as she withdrew, I found me alone in the valley.When I returned to the city, whose turbulence no longer vexed me, I repeated her words:

“Beauty is that which attracts your soul,and that which loves to give and not to receive.”

Cultivating The Beautiful by Vernon Howard

By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.
Vernon Howard

Beauty by G.O.Warren

Beauty
G. O. Warren

NOT flesh alone am I, when I can be
So swiftly caught in Beauty’s shimmering thread
Whose slender fibres, woven, held by me,
With their frail strength my following heart have led.

Yea, not all mortal, not all death my mind,
When, watching by lone twilight waters’ brim
I tremblingly decipher, as they wind,
Her deathless hieroglyphs, though strange and dim.

So for this faith, when Thou my dust shalt bring
To dust, remember well, Great Alchemist,
Yearly to change my wintry earth to spring,
That I with Beauty still may keep my tryst.

Reflections On Science,Intelligence & Teaching :Science & the aesthetic sense by Richard Fynman *Two Kinds of Intelligence by Rumi *On teaching by Khalil Gibran

Music:
Nights of Silk and Tears-Ernesto Cortazar

Emile Vernon Painting

Science & the aesthetic sense
Richard P. Feynman

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken
a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up
a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll
agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful
this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and
it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind
of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is
available to other people and to me too, I believe.

Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as
he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.
At the same time, I see much more about the flower than
he sees. I could imagine the cells in there,
the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty.
I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one
centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions,
the inner structure, also the processes.

The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order
to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting;
it means that insects can see the color. It adds
a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in
the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of
interesting questions which the science knowledge
only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe
of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

Two Kinds of Intelligence
Rumi

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.

On Teaching
Khalil Gibran

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already
lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple,
among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather
of his faith and his lovingness.

If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house
of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold
of your own mind.

The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of
space, but he cannot give you his understanding.

The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in
all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests
the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.

And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell
of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot
conduct you thither.

For the vision of one man lends not
its wings to another man.

And even as each one of you stands alone in God’s
knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his
knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.

Insightful beauty quotes

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Virginia Wolfe

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.
John Ruskin

There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight.
Gertrude Jekyll

Most of us have lost that sense of unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us do not today believe that whatever the ups and down of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful.
Gregory Bateson