The Search for Beauty
Embrace what inspires you
When was the last time you were inspired? Inspired to be a better person? Inspired to look around you and actually see your surroundings? Has your soul ever been moved? We have within us the inherent ability to feel on a higher plain, but do we let it happen?
When you see what humans are capable of creating; words that transport, music that transcends and architecture that leaves us breathless…these inspire us. They inspire us to be better, they inspire us to see beyond the ugliness that is always before us and overcome.
We were created to be on a higher plain. A place where we are more than just drones, living day in and day out in the same building we have created. It is a challenge to live each day and find inside ourselves the thing that makes us want to step up to the next level on our human ladder; to see over the top of what everyone else sees and bring our intellectual selves into the picture. We need conscious thinking about what can possibly be and move beyond the confines of our highly limited physical sight.
Americans, in particular, have done a fine job of losing all thought of a higher calling; a higher, deeper state of existence than the one that lives paycheck to paycheck and post to post. Our culture has all but destroyed what lives inside us, to cause us to feel, search, create and question. We are stifled and censored and barely hanging on as tattered rags in an existence that is hardly worth the effort. The beauty that moves us is outweighed by the ugliness and intolerance of men…if you let the malevolent win.
We need to look around, even if we have to reach into the past, to find the beautiful and hold on. Listen. Read. I urge you to be affected by beauty and realize that swelling feeling as you look around as something bigger inside you, waiting to be acknowledged and let it complete you. Embrace the entirety that you were meant to be and let go of the meaningless and shallow that you think defines you as it defines the majority of those around us.
Have a dinner party, drink good wine and talk about philosophy. Use your best dishes and your best glasses and enjoy. Listen to Van Morrison’s The Healing Game album in the background.
Pick the lavender in your garden and tie it in bundles. Pick fresh flowers and herbs.
Buy the good stuff at the grocery store.
Read a simply simple great book. My number one pick for something to transport you is called Travels With Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck.
Listen to a truly wonderful piece of music. One of my favorites is Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight. It is not long enough, but he will get you started. I also love to cook dinner to the sounds of Dinah Washington. The two have even been mixed together for her song This Bitter Earth, even though she passed in the 1960’s.
Take time to look at beautiful paintings. Vincent van Gogh moves me.
Travel through Italy with a large coffee table book and just tune out all the noise.
Refuse to be defined by the mundane and idiotic. Expect more from yourself than the status quo of every other person. You are NOT them. Embrace all that you are. And more. Let the greatness inside you move you to become more, expect more and enjoy more.