Beauty

Oh unhappy heart. You ask for the world, I can give you only the moon and so you cry “foul.” Whyfor can you not find contentment in a daisy? The rose garden is too filled with thorns to enter. A candle can warm you but you cry for cold stars that cannot be reached. Oh uhappy heart, you threaten to burst but will not, for then your noxious cries would cease to torment me. Be content or be away, I beg of you, my unhappy heart!
Beauty cannot die or vanish. Magic is eternal, transmutable. All things that are, or shall be, must be born of what was and so carry its nature in themselves. That which was beautiful or magical animates that which is and therein lies the magical beauty. Life's force, which binds atoms and spins galaxies, is eternal, changing and changeless.
It flows through all creation, lending coherence and power to all that is. It is a force so great, containing so many pondering minds dreaming dreams and creating great deeds that it itself, has a great sentience. This life energy, manifesting as light, warmth, sound, movement, power, and destruction, utilizes all of the minds, all existing sentience in all of creation to know, to learn, to grow, and has since the first thought;

"I am."
As this great sentience grows, learns, and becomes wise, so too do its diverse parts, including men, women, dolphins and carrots. We all grow.
This however, is a great and ponderous beast, this universe, and progress must be measured in eons. Our egos cannot survive long enough in one form to take the measure without recorded history, but our souls, coherent bits of that great energy, know all about it.
Beauty cannot be killed or maimed, only changed into something unrecognized by us. We see the strangeness. We say "It is thoroughly different from what was. What was, was beautiful. Since this thing is so much changed, it must be opposite and therefore ugly." Still, because it exists and coheres, it carries within itself the beauty of the life force and cannot therefore be ugly.
Could we but see it with the eyes if a newborn or a madman, we would recognize it for what it is; a piece of the almighty, magic and beauty and power bound up in a piece of concrete or insect, metal, or rotten debris.
Amen.
March 1992


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