Month: January 2017

I ultimately became far more interested in the making of art, as a pianist, accompanist, and flutist with local orchestras and chamber groups. Two degrees later, I still had not arrived at a “definition” of beauty, in the arts or otherwise.

The full moon rises behind the western span, dressed in the amazing Bay Lights. The bay itself is suddenly silver, painted by the Goddess Herself and the breath is sucked out of us. Beauty should be divine.

Beauty is ubiquitous, and felt at least as much as seen, if not more so. It is the stuff of stoppage and revelation. It is anything or anyone that makes me cease what I am doing, take notice, and become awash with joy, intrigue, allure, wonder, and admiration.

When I think of beauty, I first imagine natural images: bluebirds bathing in the feeder, cirrus clouds scribbling a blue sky, maples bursting into autumn flame.

I am drawn to what is creative or unseen, versus the typical standard, a different way of seeing, or saying, or moving, a different way of touching someone or exciting them. Beauty is the ability to see beyond. It is in wanting to look below to the pulse. Beauty is the struggle to contemplate the heart.

A rose is pretty. We admire the velvet petals as they embrace each other. We touch it or smell it. A rose in the snow is prettier because we see warmth in the cold.

Beauty is each impulse that makes us drop the dishcloth, the phone, the remote — so we can pick up a pen, a paintbrush, a camera to “fix” it in some form and try to make it our own.

there are different kinds of beauty. A mountain range takes my breath away, as does a sea at storm. But there is also something sublime in a mother who’s fallen asleep holding her sick child–the pain of her experience, her fear of what could happen to her child, the child’s fear transmuted into rest by its trust in its mother–that’s something beyond the prosaic and the everyday. You simply have to be willing to see it, rather than to close your eyes to the possibility of wonder.

my partner and I drove past a long, long freight train standing still. Even now its beauty enlarges and humbles me: the winter sunlight, the multicolored graffiti entwined on every single car, the absence/presence of people–who drove that train? who adorned it?–and the stillness–where had it traveled already?

It’s when there’s no turning back; you’ve tasted sweat of a dream, lips soaked in a poet’s verse, mending with his voice smoke from Parisian chimneys on an autumn evening, as the rain falls.

The natural world serves as my most consistent doorway to it–whether through a mackerel sky at sunset, the geometry of garden flowers, striations in stones, the hover of raptors, the myriad shapes of insects, the wind swirling grass, or light playing on water. I’m awed by fractals and iridescence.

To me beauty is the acceptance of oneself, the appreciation even, letting our qualities, or the quality of our creations, shine out, regardless and heedless of the opinions of others.

A thing, an act, an atmosphere is beautiful when it engages the heart, the intellect, the past, and the body, which is the present as well as the gift.

No drought, no summer of heat in the hundred-teens, no monsoon / or long gone prohibition against our kind will kill us. Our stoicism / lives on to offer applause to the windstorms, that seasonal ushering.

It started with a list of made up words for kinds of snow, followed by their definitions, and short poems as explication. It was, of course, strange to be writing about snow while in Thailand…

The moment of the last breath lingers and silence envelops the room. The intimacy of such a scene contains a certain beauty that can only be experienced by those who are present. Beauty is art. Beauty is life. Beauty is pain and suffering. Beauty is joy and glory.

I am preoccupied with words,with mixing them up, getting them a little wrong to surprise, in order for the reader to forget she is mortal for one split second.

I as a poet and an impartial observer try staying in the fullness of the ‘beautiful’ where I gather. I can’t lose it. It’s too scarce to be lost.

For me, beauty is looking out my window and finding the harmony of the world. It’s staring into my love’s eyes as my mind floods with memories of our past, our dreams of the future. It’s gazing into the mirror at my own face and finding joy. We have to explore, redefine, and reclaim beauty for ourselves.

Carol Smallwood – Two Poems What Does it Mean?“It is what it is” a clerk replied to my...

Beauty is circular and generative, vigorous and fertile, the soil from which springs more beauty, which then in turn drops its seeds.

In people and artistic expression, I think beauty assembles in our spirit the perfect pieces needed to create a whole and fix our attention. In memory, these occasions may become ideal forms that we may seek to achieve for the rest of our life. Day by day, beauty is a minefield.

Some call this the “dark night of the soul,” some call it the years eaten by locusts. In my mind, such seasons lead to victory, showing how our version of ugly can rise out of the ground and become great beauty

Beauty is wakefulness to the alignment of things as they are in their pristine form. For me, beauty is arriving at Oneness with things: spiritual/psychical and physical. Beauty exists by the exercise of the power within and without.

I measure beauty by the rate my body changes in temperature and interior jolts. My smile widens; my pupils dilate and retract. There is always a physical experience when I encounter beauty

I am hoping this poem will raise awareness to the emotional state of ‘newcomers’ and make a ripple in tolerance and kindness. I moved from Beirut to Geneva during the Lebanese civil war. Leaving everything and everyone you know and love behind takes some adjustment. There is a sense of being pulled from your roots.

three times she salutes the sun on this foggy day, bowing, her back to where the sun actually is, still facing this spectacular tower, its balance on one leg, its stalk a glamor of wonder

That’s basically what Herrick was saying in his “Delight in Disorder” in which “a sweet disorder” or a “wild civility” is preferable to art which is not “too precise in every part.” In other words, “Your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none” (Emerson).

We take as much of the whole as possible. There may be “out” and “into” for us, there may not. We do what we do and we acknowledge the mystery. The mysteries, secrets, demons, gods encountered and felt. Wo/Man Intuition: pursuing Beauty.

Beauty is a tug on a fishing line, seeing what you caught, but mostly, taking out the hook and letting it go.

And in that revelation, in that unearthing of grace, a glimpse of the unsayable can be had, an idea of what is centered at the core of our experience, but stays veiled beyond touching until its shadow can be seen in beauteous language.

It’s a search for stillness amongst the out-rushing waves of time. A flower that will die. A moment that’s already passed, captured. When that’s achieved, the result is perceived as beauty.

Beauty breaks the bounds of time and space. It transcends the boundaries between you and me, us and them. It is as essential to life as water, and just as easily taken for granted when we do not want for it.