Month: May 2018

Often what interests me in poetry are the nuances, the description of something that is not easily expressed in words but that you can recognize and feel in your gut. Poetry articulates the inexpressible.

Perhaps when it’s the stage of the process, or a particular object, that we take to be fundamentally beautiful, then momentarily we forget ourselves and the differences between us and the object, empirical or transcendent, that seem so transparent after the experience of beauty.

 I’ve had a strange relationship with beauty owning to a number of circumstances. I’ve coveted beauty. I’ve envied it, revered it, hated its tyranny, and worshipped its privileges.

Everything that exists has a unique mysterious element embedded within itself… The process of understanding the key ingredients of beautiful things comes from an obsession to create something similar. Long after admiration begins an abstract traverse of the mind. We first try breaking the crust of superficiality and then attempt to get beneath the intricate layers, all in the anticipation of touching the core of things that fascinate us.

Think of  discovering  how one object in  nature can shape-shift into the character of another person or thing, such as the silhouette of a tree (in the moonlight) that becomes a Hopi flute player, an old woman with a cane or whatever the mind allows itself to see; this is the beauty of  being aware, connecting the human soul to that of the natural world. 

Our human vocation is to notice and respond to beauty, to the Great Beauty, which both calls us home to itself and out again into the world which we are called to beautify in our particular ways.

At this point, I have to look for moments that seem beautiful, even if some of them feel sentimental or precious, because they may be the only bits of decency that are left to us.

We first try to understand others’ view of things and then find openings in them where our own ways of seeing can fit, creating in the observers the same stirrings that the thing of beauty had first inspired in us.