Today, I feel completely not up to the task of exploring "beauty", yet I think that is why it seems necessary to plow ahead. The news of the world is so distressing and potentially distressing, and there is a little "Greek chorus" within me saying, how can you possibly think beauty is important on a day like today? For that matter, from the world's standpoint, when is it ever important?
Interestingly enough, on the list of "Words of the Goddess" that I compiled many years ago, "beauty" was around the twentieth. In other words, it wasn't near the top of my list. It didn't come to me immediately. And yet now, I think it is almost on a par with Love. If I were the Goddess, it might be co-equal. Once again, dictionary definitions are absolutely no help whatsoever. Phrases such as "pleasing to the eye" don't begin to capture the essence of beauty. There must be as many standards of beauty as there are people on the planet, although my current hunch is that there are many people for whom beauty is invisible or genuinely unimportant.
So why do I think beauty would be honored in a construct that also honored the divine feminine? Am I falling into a trap...beauty is important to me, and my life seems to have been singularly off the patriarchal radar screen, so therefore by default, it must be important to the Goddess? That's possible. Truly, I don't know what to say, because this is such uncharted territory. I've been mulling over my experiences in the Old Paradigm/church (almost exclusively the Episcopal Church and Church of England). In baptism, confirmation, catechisms, Bible readings, sermons...how often were we in the congregation invited to create works of beauty? How often did we hear the words "beauty" or "beautiful"? In my experience, in discussions of religion, almost never. There were admonitions against sinning, and for honoring God, His laws, His traditions. Various people were considered blessed: those who were pure in heart, those who were poor and sick (and those who helped them), those who were persecuted for God's sake. Unique and powerful expressions of beauty were borne out of the Anglican tradition, of course, from the cathedrals and all their artwork, the choral tradition and musical compositions, and the extraordinary poetic beauty of the original Book of Common Prayer. In the church of my childhood, this tradition was, to a certain extent, "worshipped" in its own right. But that made it even more devastating to be a girl who, in the early 1960's, knew that she wanted to work in that milieu and that she never would or could. Beauty would never be my "workplace". So many artistic people have been similarly deprived, so discouraged early on that they couldn't catch up later in life even when norms started to change.
This is a subject that there is no way to cover in one post. I feel like a fool for trying. All I can say is that I believe that all forms of beauty -- so-called natural, and so-called human-made (in theory there is no schism here) -- are "divine", in whatever sense you want to take that. Integrity-filled efforts to create beautiful works of art, or to work with rather than against natural beauty, are far more valid than our culture acknowledges. Looking back, I didn't understand how crucial beauty (and expressing beauty) was to my well-being. I suppose it was a combination of factors, both personal and cultural; living apart from my preferred kinds of beauty has left me only half alive. Perhaps our world's focus on almost everything but beauty has left all of us half alive.
Love and beauty are my litmus tests. Now I gauge the alignment of everything I experience to love and beauty. The only things that seem real are things that are loving, lovely and beautiful. That's all I can say today.
