John O'Donohue

Beauty does not linger, it only visits. Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm, it calls us to feel, think, and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. Beauty is a gentle but urgent call to awaken. Bestselling author John O'Donohue opens our eyes, hearts, and minds to the wonder of our own relationship with beauty by exposing the infinity and mystery of its breadth. His words return us to the dignity of silence, profundity of stillness, power of thought and perception, and the eternal grace and generosity of beauty's presence. In this masterful and revelatory work, O'Donohue encourages our greater intimacy with beauty and celebrates it for what it really is: a homecoming of the human spirit. As he focuses on the classical, medieval, and Celtic traditions of art, music, literature, nature, and language, O'Donohue reveals how beauty's invisible embrace invites us toward new heights of passion and creativity even in these uncertain times of global conflict and crisis.

The Invisible Embrace

Beauty

Laura Mei

True beauty is numinous. Like consciousness it shines with a light from beyond itself, and beauty can never be captured or controlled because there's something elusive in it that invests the aura of a person, or a landscape, or an experience. Beauty is also autonomous; it's like a force from elsewhere and it has an incredible spontaneity and playfulness in it. It is mysterious and it visits us when we are ready to receive it.

We have all lost a sense of reverence and the notion of reverence is full of riches that we now desperately need. Put simply, it's appropriate that a person should dwell upon the earth with reverence. Ultimately, reverence is respect before mystery. But it's more than an attitude of mind, it's also a physical attention of the body that shows that the sacred is already here. And reverence is not to be reduced to social posture; reverence is deeper than that and has a sense of the playful and the humorous in it. Reverence is indeed the companion of humility, and when we enter into reverence we are aware of the deep beauty at the heart of things. Our modern consumerist mindset has squandered all reverence and that's why it's so lonesome and empty. As parent, child, lover, artist, or prayer, a sense of reverence opens pathways of beauty to surprise us. The earth is full of thresholds where beauty awaits a reverent presence.

And one thing the Eros of the mind has always tried to explore is the forms in which beauty dwells amongst us. Thought is an amazing thing. When a mind awakens to its own potential for creativity and for thinking it is amazing what can actually happen, because a thought can be a mirror, a lens, a bridge, a wall, a window, a ladder, a home. You can actually dwell inside a thought and it's the most intimate and sacred of temples. Some of the most intimate presences in our lives live within us as thoughts.

The integrity and truth of a society is determined by its willingness and ability to engage contradiction. Normally in life we tend to shy away from contradiction because we tend to think that contradiction is the enemy of truth. But for the imagination, contradiction is interesting and has a lovely intensity. The imagination can dwell with contradiction and deepen it, because it has a loyalty to the deeper unity where everything comes together. The imagination sees in contradiction all kinds of rich possibilities that the mind would never see and that's the difficulty of a linear mind, or a mind that sees the world in black and white: it is always cutting away half the harvest, half the glory, half the struggle and half the celebration. When your mind is too tight and narrow, you live in a very tight, lonesome world of predictability. The imagination is the great friend of possibility.

May the beauty of your life become more visible to you that you may glimpse your wild divinity. May the wonders of the earth call you forth from all your small, secret prisons and set your feet free in the pastures of possibility. May the light of dawn anoint your eyes that you may behold what a miracle a day is. May the liturgy of twilight shelter all your fears and darknesses within the circle of ease. May the angel of memory surprise you in bleak times with new gifts from the harvest of your vanished days. May you allow no dark hand to quench the candle of hope in your heart. May you discover a new generosity towards yourself and encourage yourself to engage your life as a great adventure. May the outside voices of fear and despair find no echo in you; may you always trust the urgency and wisdom of your own spirit. May the shelter and nourishment of all the good you have done, the love you have shown, and the suffering you have carried, awaken around you to bless your life a thousand times. And when love finds the path to your door, may you open like the earth to the dawn and trust your every hidden colour toward its nourishment of light. May you find enough stillness and silence to delight in the eternity that shaped you, that holds you and calls you. And may you come to see your life as a quiet sacrament of service which awakens around you a rhythm where doubt gives way to the grace of wonder, where what is awkward and strained can find elegance, where crippled hope can find wings, and torment enter at last into the grace of serenity. May divine beauty bless you.

Beauty quotes

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