By Kathy Hendricks
Now that we have nearly reached the end of 2024, I am revisiting my intention to focus on beauty. As I noted in my New Year’s post, the upcoming twelve months looked to be steeped in some pretty ugly events and attitudes. Sad to say, I was right. It led me to focus attention on the more subtle forms of beauty that are often overlooked when the more garish aspects of public life take center stage. I need more time to process the experience, but here are a couple of lessons learned through my intentional “year of beauty.”
First of all, it is heartening to recognize the power around a focused intention. This struck home while I was at a local fitness center one morning. Cycling away on a recumbent bike, my attention was drawn to the large TV screen perched on the wall between two picture windows. I couldn’t hear what was being said but the images and banner scrolls gave a good picture of current events – none of which were happy or enlightening. Pulling my gaze away, I let it rest on the scene outside the window where a small group of deer were chewing on shrubbery along the parkway. The other window afforded a gorgeous view of nearby mountain peaks as the morning sun hit them. The ubiquitous nature of TVs, tablets, and cellphones creates a magnetic effect. Choosing to focus elsewhere brought an instant change of mindset as I recalled my commitment to beauty.
A source of inspiration and insight throughout the year was John O’Donohue’s book, Beauty, which I read in slow fashion over the past several months. Each entry revealed the various layers and depths of beauty. These, in turn, helped me to stop equating beauty with prettiness. To be sure, there are beautiful sites to behold; I just described two of them. O’Donohue’s book took a deeper approach and drew me to the kind of beauty that lies within the unseen, the imaginative, and even the flaws in myself and in the world around me. “Beauty is not all brightness,” he writes. “In the shadowlands of pain and despair we find slow, dark beauty.” I have a way to go with this one, but it is at least opening me up to the subtle ways that our pain can be a force that brings us together and guides us toward a gentler gaze toward one another and ourselves.
A Response
by Barbara Radtke
Kathy, thank you for re-visiting your 2024 new year intention for us. I resonate with the point that beauty is not always prettiness or prettiness as I have imagined and identified it.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The uniqueness of the beholder’s world often makes beautiful to them what I would overlook. I had two lessons that brought that point home. A long time ago, I had a colleague who was a mathematician. When she solved a difficult problem, I said to her: ”That must have been satisfying.” She responded: “More than that, it IS a thing of beauty.”
An equally long time ago, I had a crown on a tooth that presented many difficulties to my dentist. He had to make it three times before he was satisfied that it fit properly. Since that dentist, I have been to several dental specialists. Each time I go to a new person, they call their assistant’s attention to that crown. Several have used the word “beautiful.” At first, I thought using the word was just a convention. But once, when there was a student working with the dentist, I became convinced from their conversation that they were really talking about a thing of beauty. While these are not examples of a “slow, dark beauty” to which O’Donohue refers, they illustrate that beauty is not necessarily where we expect to experience it nor is it the same as what we might call “pretty.”
Dear reader, I hope you can pause in your daily occupations and holiday preparations to be alert to the moments of beauty in your life. We’d love to hear where you found them.
Photo credit: Ron Hendricks - Used with permission
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