Beauty
Peacock Journal exists to celebrate beauty—in language, in image, in form. We seek work that is radiant, resonant, and quietly profound. Before sending us your submission, we encourage you to read the following invitation carefully. And yes, we do suggest reviewing our “Alice’s Restaurant” Rule before you begin.
We ask each contributor to include a brief reflection on their own sense of beauty. We understand this is an unusual request, and we know it can make even seasoned writers hesitate. Some respond with a shrug toward cliché: “It’s all in the work,” or “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” or “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” But we hope you’ll go a little deeper than that. What draws your gaze, holds your attention, stirs your spirit? Where do you find it, and why does it matter?
Not everyone is used to being asked such things. A blank page can be as daunting as it is full of promise. That’s why we’ve gathered a selection of past Beauty Statements—not as models to copy, but as kindling. Let them spark your own quiet reckoning. Consider this an invitation: to say something real, and maybe a little bit luminous.
Beauty encompasses presence and also hope. My poems here attempt to convey that moment of standing in awed stillness before a Manet painting—following the brushstrokes, the colors, the light—and feeling transported, feeling a sense of possibility, of hope, of connection to something larger than oneself. Beauty is that which lifts us, which reminds us of the wonder and mystery of existence.
I think the mind creates its world. It houses the keys to form. The museum is not an actual place but a context of memory, association, and intense focus. Beauty is the spirit level that reminds us we are alive. It is the language by which we talk with the world. It is our only sight—it is our only speech. When one says “beautiful,” one means it is not merely the form, but the connection of every moment that brought that delight to its surface.
.
As a Buddhist, I’ve come to realize that beauty arises from, and is the essence of existence. We cannot exist (long) without it, nor can we define it. It is like Buddha nature; it is there, independent of us—it does not require us, we require it. Children innately understand beauty; as we age, we begin to seek it. We would be better served remembering the advice of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Our job is merely to allow beauty in all of its shapes and forms.
All that I really understand about the nature of beauty is that it is somehow bound up with time. When we witness something that overwhelms our senses with its beauty, we are briefly anchored in the present moment—not swinging back and forth like a mad pendulum between memory and expectation. Simultaneously, the experience of beauty makes us want to stop the flow of time, to capture the experience (in memory, in a cell phone photo, in a poem) and make it last—which, like pinning a butterfly to a board, only succeeds in killing it.
.
Beauty, for me, is an elusive thing. You know it when you see it, yet you don’t always know when you will see it. It can hide in plain sight, in the most common things. Early mist rising from the fields for instance or the sound of a boat tugging on its rope or leaves of a tree rushing in the wind, playing with the light of the sun. Then again it can lurk in unexpected places, suddenly striking out from the pages of a book, from lines of poetry, taking you by surprise. That kind of beauty, the profound, transcendental kind, is especially hard to predict and even harder to describe. It escapes definition in the same manner a cat sometimes slinks out from underneath your touch. That’s where poetry comes in.
.
I think of beauty as akin to the numinous, an element that fills us with awe and partakes of the divine. I suspect that nonverbal art, such as music, dance, and painting, have an easier time apprehending beauty than writing does. Beauty is subjective, of course, but it’s universal in that the concept of beauty seems to exist in all times and places. Beauty is often misrepresented as flimsy and superficial, but it isn’t. Beauty beguiles, fascinates, seizes us…
.
To me, truth is the deeper beauty. Sometimes I sit in the fire and sometimes I sit in the garden. I am often concerned that friends use soothing concepts like beauty and positivity as hiding places, deflecting shards of reality rather than coping or taking action. We might all seek a hiding place from today’s twenty-four hour news cycle, and the feeling that there’s no cure for the greed, vanity, and brutality displayed there.
Sitting in the fire, I try to be present with life’s ugliness in order to move through it, rather than around it. Then, when I sit in the garden, being present with sensory beauty all around me is an easy, organic process. I never wonder about the purpose of beauty. It just is, like death and traffic and buzzing silence.
For my poetry, I make lists of “shiny things,” the mundane and random details of my days. I populate my poems with these. I adore the beauty in my goat Rye dancing, the fringe of pine needles hanging in my manzanita tree, and a website dedicated to artful, competitive shoelace tying. It’s the micro and the macro, the tiny details drawing my eye to universal truths, that I find beautiful, destructive, and true. At the end of my day, I love beauty, and find reason to look truth in the eye.
.
Because we are never truly in control, it’s essential to find beauty when we are out of our element. This can be true of a situation in which you find yourself physically in an unfamiliar space. Look around, seen another way, surely there is something otherwise ordinary that in this context you can tell yourself is beautiful. Then there are the psychological situations we find ourselves in. New territory? Maybe territory we know all too well. At some point in your life you are statistically likely to face a depressive episode. Sadly, it’s a regular thing for many of us. How do we find beauty when the clear blue sky above appears as black? I don’t have the answer for you though, of course, I wish I did. I don’t have the answer for me either. Not all the time. Sometimes I manage to break away from the darkness and see something right in front of me that I would have otherwise ignored. William Burroughs has this poetry prompt where he asks students to go out thinking about a color (“red” for example) and then walk around paying attention to all the “red” things we see. David Foster Wallace, in his famous commencement speech This is Water, warns us about our tendency towards functioning on auto-pilot or, in DFW terms, our “default setting.” It’s hard to walk through the world, especially when you’re down. And we’re wired (well, differently and by degrees) to ignore the majority of data bombarding us. If we gave our full attention to everything it would be too painful to go outside. When we can break away from our baseline, (whatever that may be), to see something that we’d otherwise pass by without notice, we surprise ourselves discovering how much beauty is out there just waiting for us to notice and deem beautiful.
.
It’s a cold mid-November Sunday and the local birds have realized we’ve hung the feeders. They flit in and out, chickadee and jay, as three young squirrels, probably on their first forage, eye the tube of sunflower seeds. One hops back and forth along the closest pickets of a nearby fence. Another has climbed the dogwood branch from which the feeder is suspended, hanging by his toes, white belly stretched, forepaws clawing at the air. A third sits among the cracked shells beneath, feasting on what’s been cast aside. Beauty is here in each creature’s hunger and action. And in my watching.
.