Renewing My Vows to Beauty
Lord the enormous days are hard, lord the contradictions build up, lord the stakes are high and higher, lord the idiocy is hard to drown out, lord we are asked to be kind to the unkind and it is abhorrent.
I had begun a post about renewing my vows to beauty. I had remembered a post from years back where I had renewed my vows to writing.
And then, as often happens, someone else said likely better most of what I wanted to say. From Anne Lamott on Facebook:
“Well, how does us appreciating spring help the people of Ukraine? If we believe in chaos theory, and the butterfly effect, that the flapping of a Monarch’s wings near my home can lead to a weather change in Tokyo, then maybe noticing beauty—flapping our wings with amazement—changes things in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It means goodness is quantum. Even to help the small world helps. Even prayer, which seems to do nothing. Everything is connected.”
From Rumi (Ladinsky translation):
We Exchanged Rings
Wonder and I took a vow; we exchanged rings.
I fell in love, and she accepted all my desires.
I am lying now in a meadow holding the sky
in my arms.
If I turn my gaze away from you, this earth,
please do not feel ignored. I’ll come back and
kiss you again.
This past week for my morning doodle, I’ve drawn variations of this conversation: “do not become soul dampened” and “the antidote to the poisons of the world is the ongoing creation of beauty.” (Actually I usually swear a lot more in my morning doodle but I bring to you here the cleaned up version).
There is a theme going on in my social media, too, and I am here for it. A friend shared this by Roger Ebert:
“I believe that if, at the end of it all according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances…we must try. I didn’t always know this and I am happy that I lived long enough to find it out.”
– Roger Ebert
Kathleen Wall, on her blog Blue Duets, shared this:
“Rather than understanding my astonishment as dishonest, I have come to see it as necessary. What happens to that rope when we give in to despair and all the lack of care for others and the planet that follows close on the heels of despair? To keep the rope of history strong during this time, we need to celebrate the beauty and the goodness that threads through each of our lives. We need to realize that our lives matter. The attention we give to our lives matters. Every act of kindness and creativity adds another thread to the rope of history.”
Rumi, again:
“Be like the wing on the way to the party
that can lift yourself and others.”
and:
“Things are such, that someone lifting a cup,
or watching the rain, petting a dog,
or singing, just singing — could be doing as
much for this universe as anyone.”
I’ve been telling myself not to pine for things I didn’t want anyway. I am completely okay to be sentenced to 20 years of boredom for trying to change the system from within.
I have continued to read Matt Licata’s A Healing Space this week from my IRL soul-dampened state. He talks about accepting what has come. “By “accept” here, it’s important to note we are not condoning or settling for something, resigned to it staying forever, or even making some claim that we “like” what is happening — that we are “okay” with it or have forgiven another for causing us pain.” He goes on: “It is an act of intelligence and integrity to bring forth clear boundaries, say no (at times loudly and forcefully), engage in healthy conflict when necessary and do what is necessary to protect our own body, psyche, and integrity.” (In the book I have underlined and circled and starred the word integrity).
I’ve worked for a long time on being a non-harming human being. But this is not a passive state. We still need to exercise a personal ethics; we need to be discriminating! The great comparative religionist, Joseph Campbell, said (and I quote this from time to time), says that “I’m not the Dalai Lama, who’s supposed to have unconditional love for everything in the world. Even God doesn’t have unconditional love. He throws people into hell. I personally don’t even think that unconditional love is an ideal. I think you’ve got to have a discriminating faculty and let bastards be bastards and let those that ought to be hit in the jaw get it.”
He also said: “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.”
Which is perhaps too far the other direction. But. (And I’m not one for anyone getting a hit in the jaw except metaphorically tbh).
The poet Anna Kamienska from that always astonishing collection in translation Astonishments:
“Don’t worry there’ll still be a lot of suffering
for now you have the right to cling to the sleeve
of someone’s blunt friendship
to be happy is a duty which you neglect
a careless use of time
you send days like geese to the meadow
don’t worry you’ll die many times
until you learn at the very end to love life”
In short, we’re not helping anyone by ceasing to create beauty. We can bring all our intelligence, our integrity, our ethical sense, our goodness, into making beautiful things. Will it change the world? Unlikely. Will it change you? Yes. Will it perhaps protect your soul? Also yes. Don’t be silent but make your art as an antidote to the poison out there. Fill up the spaces with your creativity, your joy, your beauty, your intelligence. Let’s do this thing.