The stripes of a tiger, so perfectly aligned as to call attention to themselves, serve as camouflage to other predators and prey. But if that alone, why the perfection and the artistry to our eyes?
Why the beauty of the mountains? Why the neon colors of deep-sea fish? What is it about the “natural beauty” of a person that attracts us? How do we know it when we see it?
When we see beauty, what is it we’re seeing?
Natural beauty–Nature’s humbling gorgeousness that fills us with awe and joy and inspiration, that leaves us breathless, leaves us speechless–is unconstructed beauty. It is beauty not born of thought. It comes from nowhere, nothing. It is uncreated. It just is.
Natural beauty is a slap in the face of our trying, our constructs, our artificiality, and our running from Nature. Not just running from our interconnectedness with Nature, but our True Nature beyond ourselves as thought, beyond time.
What is it that we feel when gazing at raw, natural beauty? We feel the Love that we are, childlike, and beyond egoic control. We feel release. Release from ourselves as the thought constructs that we temporarily are into the deepest Being that we never were not.
We feel eternity. We feel the child behind the adult. We feel a taste of our formless wholeness that has no beginning and no end.
We feel what we are and too often translate it into what we are missing, because the illusion of separation that defines physicality and time leads us to believe that we’re gazing at someone or something else. And then we wish we were that other. Wish we had what they have. And then we chase it or else hold this piercing moment as a cherished memory that evokes feeling when we hearken back to it.
Meanwhile, beauty is a calling, not a remembrance. Not a calling to do anything, but away from doing. Beauty is intrinsic to Being and we are Being. We are, therefore, that beauty. But we are so lost in translating and working and believing in the surface aspects of us that we find it harder to recognize beauty as us than in that which is untouched by our creative hand.
We are the tear in our eye and the smile on our face. We are what we feel we’ve received from out there. We are the moment. All of it, inside and out.
We’re what we’ve been looking for all along, and what we’ve been looking at. The gazer and the gazed are one.
That one is beautiful.