Return to Beauty

My sources of inspiration are men and women who have graced our world by writing or painting or creating soliliques about nature, about the land, about the nonhuman existence. Trees, bears, bugs, soil, water in all its forms. The human, with our species ability to think, rarely understands how thought stands between the experience of being alive and the life of the mind.

Thought can stand between wonder and the mind – our political constructs a recent example. I have to relearn this periodically. Nature is an endless well of creativity and joy and the font from which the best thoughts arose when our species had ready and more intact nature for inspiration.

People can be wells of beauty, too. Think on a little child and the wonderment in his eyes…before thoughts circumvent that pure sense of wonderment into an altered form of itself. The people whom I turn to for inspiration go to nature often and some eventually return to a life in the wood.

Somewhere in “there” we might reside in joy and be a part of a constructed world. We would need to rethink almost everything about modern Western culture that places a dollar value on everything. Everything.

I came to believe that what is on the news, the fear-saturated society in which we have become experts at scaring the s**t out of ourselves, is real. Then, I go to the trees or the mountains and step into wonder and commune with them. I had forgotten we are not in a political jail without a get-out-of- jail free card. My God, I got sucked down that well of artificiality, again!

It’s not that I step completely away from our self-made social terribles, but only that I remember what is real, where my soul resides, and how to stay sane when the world we’ve made becomes insane, as it has in my country now. We got here because so many of us believed a contructed image, a constructed reality that is anything but real. Because of that, we have lost our minds.

I step toward beauty. I step toward love and communion as one of God’s beings on a vast and beautiful planet spinning in a universe more awesome than we can ever conceive. I understand that I do not understand.

Walk in Wonder

John O’Donohue

Anam Cara

Photo by Susan Feathers