Yesterday as I was walking through the forest, I noticed how beautiful it was. Wildflowers were a randomly scattered rainbow on the ground, enveloped by lush green. Early summer is stunning in this neck of the woods.
I thought about Laurie Stone’s recent post that addressed the way women are viewed in our culture, how one dimensional it often is. How, culturally, women are portrayed as merely their influence on men.
Women even do this to other women. Even though culturally conditioned, the results feel like a betrayal.
And how similar that is to the way we’ve learned to see our beloved planet earth.
Yes, she’s beautiful, but she’s also a functioning being with so much that’s invisible to us, so profound we may never be able to fully grasp them.
We depend on her for everything, for our very lives.
What if we were to broaden our lens?
What if mere beauty was just the tip of the iceberg, the very tip of the great mystery?
I appreciate beauty everywhere I see it — and I see it everywhere! — but I know that there’s so much more breadth and depth to beauty. I know it’s not just an end in and of itself.
Complexity is everywhere, and we have reductionist tendencies to some extent. How could we navigate the world if we were constantly bogged down in all those details?
Still, acknowledging the many and varied invisible layers, functions and entanglements embodied in all of life can only be a good thing, even if it just allows us to contemplate the mysterious for a few seconds now and then…
I still marvel at the beautiful forest floor, and still appreciate beauty whenever it captures my senses. But I acknowledge that there’s so much more going on beneath the surface, and every bit of it has intrinsic value.
I’ll leave you with a poem that, admittedly, as a working class woman, is outside my range of experience. But it never fails to move me. Here is Katie Makkai’s poem Pretty.
The dictates of society regarding how we should look and behave have a toxic effect on all of us. Women are degraded when they don't look how patriarchal society, made up of men and women, have decided how they should look and behave and men often have a false sense of power that they have not earned and it would appear that they don't know what to do with anyway.
I'm glad I was raised by a good missionary's daughter. Mom always told us, "Pretty is as pretty does." Beauty comes from within our hearts and is evidenced by our words and actions, not our appearance. Yeah, being a teenager makes you worry for a time about being good-looking enough to get a date, but fortunately those hormones fade and you realize that you are "beautiful" because someone truly loved you just for being you. Thanks for the reminder, Diana.