Have you ever noticed how smiles spread? Someone smiles to you and you feel like smiling too. A child smiles and your eyes light up.
Have you ever noticed how laughter spreads? Someone laughs, genuinely, whole heartedly, and you feel the laughter arising in your soul. A child laughs and you develop a fit of the giggles.
Have you ever noticed how love spreads? When you feel genuine love in your heart when you’re with another, they feel it too, their heart slips into the same deep harmonious rhythm as yours.
You think we could do with more loving in this world? I do. And here’s how we spread it – by speaking loving words, having loving thoughts, writing and acting with loving intention.
Sometimes it’s a small detail which catches my eye and I find beautiful. Other times it’s a particular bird, work of art or a person.
But when I go to the coast (the Atlantic coast is the nearest to me) it’s the breadth, the distance, the enormity of the ocean and the extent of the horizon which I find so beautiful.
To stand at the water’s edge, watching the waves roll in, listening to the sound of the crashing on the beach, is always magical.
I find the open sky meeting the open sea utterly beautiful. It opens my heart, dissolves my boundaries, expands my horizons.
The Rodin museum in Paris is one of my most favourite museums in the world. It’s a small museum compared to the more famous ones and it is set in beautiful gardens.
Rodin was surely a genius. How he sculpted these beautiful forms out of marble is beyond me.
This particular photo is a close up of his “The Kiss” – perhaps his most famous piece, but its familiarity doesn’t blind us to its beauty.
Here it’s the subject matter, the skill and the artistry combined which contribute to this as my example, today, of beauty.
One June, a few years ago, I was in the kitchen when I heard a tremendous noise outside. I opened the door and saw a hailstorm. The pieces of ice were slicing through the leaves on the mulberry tree, bouncing high when they hit the ground and performing a convincing Ginger Baker solo on the metal garden furniture!
It didn’t last long, just a few minutes, then I stepped out into the garden and started to explore what I could see sparkling in the grass.
This photo is one of many I took that day. What astonishes me is just how every single hailstone looked so different. I suppose it’s the same with snowflakes. Their complexity is also so diverse that every one of them looks different under a microscope.
One day I was walking along the beach and I noticed this strand of seaweed and a small shell, I think it must’ve been because I saw them from this angle but in that moment I saw a face.
I framed my shot and took this photo.
I think it’s beautiful. It suggests a calm, serene face to me, a long curving eyelash and a small gem in the side of the nose. I know this is very little from which to construct a whole image but it works for me every time.
Fushimi Inari shrine, on a hillside just outside Kyoto, is one of the most impressive places I’ve ever visited.
I have a lot of photos taken along the winding path which snakes up to the top of the hill. This is such a unique path. It works it way along under hundreds of these bright red Tori gates.
They are beautiful.
You can stand anywhere on this path and see these glorious structures stretching out before and behind you. I can’t really capture in words what that feels like. It’s an experience of being inside beauty, inside art, inside creative power.
And all of this exists because of spiritual feeling amongst the people who made it.
This really is the phenomenal beauty which can emerge when spirit and art combine.
In the 14 billion years or so since the beginning of this universe (well we can trace some kind of beginning, Big Bang, or whatever, to then), an uncountable number of stars have been born, exploded, sent newly formed atoms scattering across space, smashed and fused them to make new elements, and gathered a few billion together to create this little planet we call Earth.
Every single one of us has been created out of that stardust and each and every one us has emerged, unseen before, to manifest an utterly unique human being.
Then as each of us lead our lives, forming relationships, making connections and choices, we write a brand new, and different personal life story.
Like this flamingo, you are beautiful. Like this flamingo, please spread out your wings and manifest what only you can.
The universe never made a “you” before, and won’t make another one ever again. For me, uniqueness is beautiful.
If you’re a regular reader here you’ll know about one of my most favourite French phrases – l’émerveillent du quotidien – the wonder of the everyday. I really believe that the practice of having an eye open for the amazing around me is the basis of a life of quality.
Often, very often, what catches my eye, what amazes me, is beauty.
Where do I see beauty? In the natural world, in smiles and twinkling eyes, in acts of care and kindness, in creative expression whether that be painting, sculpture, music or dance.
I think I’m going to share a photo a day for the next few days each one chosen because I find the beauty both breathtaking and amazing.
These cabinets, or others like them, are very common in this part of France. They are places to share books. You can deposit books in them and you can take, for free, any which are there.
I filled one in Cognac several times over as I culled my library before the big move and they’d disappear within days.
There’s even one in the little village I’ve now moved to.
Also, just down the road from here is an “Emmaus” shop where you can donate anything you don’t want any more and they sell them very very cheaply, allowing people to get things they need for little money and raising funds for charitable works.
I love how pervasive sharing is here and I think it’s a strong characteristic of human beings.
Whenever disaster strikes there are always folk helping each other. Such acts can be ignored or trivialised but I think they demonstrate a really important aspect of human nature – one I like to promote and share – with you.
This is the season when large flocks of starlings gather, swoop through the vineyards, and, if you’re lucky, create murmurations. They amaze me.
I am enthralled by how many will gather noisily in a single tree, then all at once they go completely silent. A second or two later they take off “as one”.
They make it so clear to me that social behaviour, how we connect, coordinate and collaborate is a fundamental characteristic of Life.
What’s so astonishing to me about these starlings is how they communicate. When they fly in great clouds of hundreds of birds, how do they do that without all crashing into each other? Whatever the mechanism every one of those birds is perceiving the others around them and adjusting their flight speed and direction constantly, moment by moment. I know there’s a whole field of study about swarming because there are many creatures which can do this, but I don’t know if scientists really understand how it’s done.
The other evidence of their ability to communicate clearly and instantaneously in a flock is the noise they make. Noise is probably not the right word. When you hear them gathering in a tree it sounds as if they are all shouting at the same time. You could say they are singing together as in a choir, but it sounds more like mass chatter than song. I’ve no idea how the flock falls silent over a second or two, or why that heralds the onset of mass flight. Whoosh, and they’re off!
We hear a lot about the importance of competition, and I don’t deny that competition is an important part of evolution, but I think we have downplayed the importance of collaboration. It’s time to address that distortion of reality and see just how important collective behaviour, communication and cooperation are to survival and growth.
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