Tag: Beauty

Lightly Child, Lightly

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Strangely, all of life’s problems, dilemmas, and difficulties are now resolved not by negativity, attack, criticism, force, or logical resolution, but always by falling into a larger “brightness” — by falling into the good, the true, and the beautiful.

– Richard Rohr, Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

 

Notes:

  • Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels.  Photo: fabrizio massetti with The sunlight in Dongchuan
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

It’s been a long day

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Or was Mill concerned that, in a perfect world, with nothing more to strive for, we might simply grow bored? As the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once upliftingly put it, “life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom.” When we are not consumed by the desire to achieve something (food, shelter, companionship, wealth, career, status, social reform, etc.), we are tortured by boredom…

The answer, he discovered through reading Wordsworth, is to take refuge in a capacity to be moved by beauty — a capacity to take joy in the quiet contemplation of delicate thoughts, sights, sounds, and feelings, not just titanic struggles…

I hope, and suspect, that Mill is right about this: that we all have the ability to find some durable joy in quietude, normalcy and contemplation. In our personal lives, and in our political lives too, it would be nice if we could escape Schopenhauer’s pendulum:

to simply enjoy where we are, at times; to find some peace in the cessation of motion…

~ Adam Etinson, from Is a Life Without Struggle Worth Living? (NY Times, October 2, 2017)

Notes: Photo: via bea’titude. Related Posts: It’s been a long day

 

Is that all it is, just beauty?

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“This is how the world is, this is how humans are,” he says. “Everything that exists must disappear. Now, our art is something that basically cannot be owned, cannot be purchased, cannot be kept. It is ephemeral, and therefore it is free — and it is beautiful.”

Is that all it is, just beauty? Christo furrows his brow, as if not understanding the question. No, nothing more. What should it be? Then he smiles indulgently and says with a shrug: “Now it is there. Soon it will be gone.” And that’s all.

~ Arno Frank, Christo’s Colossal Project in Germany in Spiegel Online. (March 14, 2013)

American artist Christo’s work, titled “Big Air Package,” was meant to be the largest inflatable object of all time. Its volume would rival the ill-fated Hindenburg blimp, still the largest airship ever created. The inflatable package, 94 meters high and 54 meters wide, of “Big Air Package” is made up of 20,350 square meters of specially made milky-white, translucent material the artist calls “ETex Christo.” A specialty firm in the northern city of Lübeck spent 2,800 hours completing 12.5 kilometers (7.8 miles) of stitching. The 600 panels of fabric are to be held together by ropes and Velcro, which are meant to allow the 5.3-metric-ton formation to hold as much air as possible.

But all that is just numbers. And numbers can’t describe the experience of stepping through the airtight revolving doors and climbing the stairs — or better put, floating up them as if you were in the interior of a surreal rain cloud. Those who want to step into this transcendental space must make their way to Oberhausen. It’s the kind of pull toward the heavens that people in the Middle Ages must have felt when they first entered a gothic cathedral and looked up.

Notes:

Lightly child, lightly.

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balloon-upside-down

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”

~ Henry Miller, Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion I

 

Notes:

  • Photo: Paul Apal’kin via Newthom. Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart.

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la-et-ms-keith-richards-announces-first-solo-album-in-more-than-20-years-20150709

In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people.

To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.

And you listen to some of that meticulous Mozart stuff and Vivaldi and you realize that they knew that too. They knew when to leave one note just hanging up there where it illegally belongs and let it dangle in the wind and turn a dead body into a living beauty.

~ Keith Richards, Life

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