Your experience with beauty is a reflection of what resides within you.
Beauty offers layers to the senses. It provides pleasing, light physical responses. Beauty can also seep under your skin, conducting hairs to stand on ends, and instantly awakening the most silenced places of you; handing you back your spirit on a grander scale. Beauty does that. It is not merely there to give.
Beauty is there to meet you where your safety ends, and where desired territory begins. It is meant to race your heart rate and flush fresh life into spaces you had forgotten exist within you. Beauty awakens the spirit; empowering it with a magnificent validation of its existence. It is asking you for your participation.
There is the perception of beauty and then there’s the actual experience of it.
We can draw such sweet nectar from our flirtation with Beauty. Taking from it what we seek, to fill our hunger in that moment. Imagine if our relationship with the beauty we perceive or actually experience, is a direct correlation to where we stand in relationship with ourselves. It is a lure for our spirit to connect. First with ourselves, so that we may then feel another. Beauty can overwhelm our love if we allow the exchange. If we allow our place in its dance, beauty will remind us that which is truly seen, must be felt.
I say, go on. Be overwhelmed.
At times, there is a separation. We perceive our focus through innocent and young eyes. Observation in a swift scan admiring what has shown up for us. This sort of youth carries a beautiful existence of living on the surety of inexperience; dancing in the narrow spotlight of the visible. It is a state of being, without truly knowing its juxtaposition. It is trust without questioning its value. Seeing with the eyes reveals a beauty that comes with a confident faith that exists without resistance, questioning, or leverage. There is no intimacy with faith when we are seeing at face value. We call it beauty even still.
With a slight pause for opening however, beauty senses your invitation. It offers you no option but to dance with it until you speak. It will sit with you until you say, ‘yes’. It is relentless in it’s quest to realize that what you see is the innocence and magnitude of the small child within, poking the tenderly protected grown up you have become. There is more to observe.
Before you can even begin thinking you have control, beauty has already swept you off of your feet and claimed your heart. Not without your permission, of course. Beauty will meet us as far as we are willing to meet it. It is a living energy engaging our senses, and touching us only as much as we are willing to be touched.
As truth-teller, activist for change, and mentor of mine, Sean Corn, says ‘See the Soul’.
There is no denying what the heart can see. When you see the soul, beauty is in the marrow of everything.
The true observation of another is love. What do you see? Ask yourself again after each answer. What do you see now? Each question triggering your version of the object’s experience. Compassion surfacing the surrender of bias and assumption. And now what do you see? Each question valiantly soft in the acceptance of what is right in front of you. Each question, a step closer to a direct connection between you and another soul. How you see, reveals what resides within you. Are you willing to risk getting to know yourself?
See the Soul. It transforms you first. See the Soul. Compassion is fostered, and a gateway to a richer understanding opens. See the Soul. Love now has the unobstructed space for exchange. You stand equally as transparent as the beauty in front of you. Reflections of one another.
And in that space, beauty speaks. The experience of beauty begins.
'I love you for your journey. I love you for who you are in it. I release the imposition of my projection onto you, which denies your truth.
I give you space and myself patience, to observe; To see you as the spirit you’ve held, healed, and unearthed yourself to be, in the wilderness of your life’s path.
I have no interest in fixing you. I have come to understand we are not beings to be fixed. We are combinations of dynamics we can’t fully grasp; sometimes holding our breath to seem more put together; sometimes yelling in freedom; sometimes hiding, and sometimes shining joy with the liberating recklessness of abandoning our programming.
So you see, I have no interest in adjusting our brokenness. I only wish to see you. I want to listen to your story if you’ll share it.
I want to love you for the trust you have or don’t have in this world. I waiver, too.
I want to feel closer to you for the human you are, and the light you carry. I want to see how it shines in the darkest corners of your spirit. I’ll show you where the embers of my trust glow when I can't see. I want to love and caress the tenderness I see that you sometimes try so hard to hide. It rises to the surface and disarms me, when I look into your eyes. I understand because I too know the fear that comes up for me, when all I want to do is melt and surrender all effort.'
This is where beauty lives. This is the peak. You’ve reached it. It doesn’t matter if the crutches were thrown out in an infuriating tantrum, or in an enlightened peaceful moment. It doesn’t matter if we swiftly accepted our need to not have to continue with our story, or if it was just too damn painful to keep at it, so we abruptly stopped. What matters is that we opened to something larger than ourselves. We found love and beauty in the process of piercing through; knowing we are worthy of something greater. We are worthy of experiencing beauty. We are worthy of recognizing ourselves in another.
This exchange; in relationship to one another; regardless of its form and texture, is the presence of love. It is a felt beauty, seen with the heart.
It is connecting souls.
Beauty resides there; in the marrow of our spirit.
