a heavenly glimmer

to stalk the beauty we cannot hold

Saint John of the Cross

The other morning I sat in the dark, studying the day’s softest moments with the dawn stars, the halfmoon overhead, and candlelight. I love these beings and felt so held by them, a gentle embrace I could only return with my heart. That’s so beautiful, I thought. But then a sudden discomfort stirred within me. The word “beautiful” felt almost gritty, and like a stranger. I gazed into a dark corner of the room and was eclipsed by a shattering thought.

I couldn’t remember what beauty means to me.

My eyes widened and stung with tears. How could I have not noticed sooner? Once obsessed with beauty, making certain my life was filled to the brim with “it”, even giving my apothecary business the tagline wild beauty, it was the force and emblem around which I had based my whole identity and my life’s work.

I felt the loss in my heart, so I reached in there, feeling around in its dark velvet caverns, seeing if I could locate that precious gem. But the beauty I known was gone, as though it had died. In that moment of despair, my mind turned to our aching world right now, our broken hearts, the great loss of human life including the uncounted lives of other species, the poisoning of soil by chemical weapons. Ecocide. A war on the Earth’s heart.

A devastation so great, surely we are all meant to emerge from this transformed, barely recognizable. And in this great unraveling and re-membering, we will be invited to collectively redefine beauty, to actively dream it into being, in the face of inner and outer landscapes that have been obliterated.

so we are grasped
by what we have not grasped,
full of promise shining in the distance.

It changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something we barely sense, but are;
a movement beckons,
answering our movement…

but we just feel the wind against us.

(Rainer Maria Rilke,
trans. Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows)

Suddenly, there in silent dark, I felt an inquiry begin to creak open like a door. I could now hunt a more blazing truth, to radically redefine one of my favorite words in human language. And as curiosity stirred within me, as I sat still and opened to the unknown, I felt it: a glimmer in my heart. It was beauty.

Beauty is a revelatory force. In allowing a new definition of the word to arise, I was actually offering myself up to beauty’s original cause. To let beauty redefine me, to rewrite me, to speak through me with her shining voice of truth. Beauty is not an inanimate, claimable thing; it is conscious and ephemeral, and appears only through our open-hearted engagement with the world. Relationship is the birthing ground for beauty. Your interaction with this world is what makes it so unbearably beautiful.

a primordial intimacy

Contrary to what we often think, beauty is invisible. Of course our eyes are an open gate through which beauty can reach for us. But our sight is conditional; what we see is dependent on our state of mind. What about the beauty we feel when our eyes are closed? When the spring wind comes? When we are rendered ecstatic by the scent of a flower? Or when music moves us to tears, or to dance? Beauty sends its messengers through the doors of all the senses. It also awakens places within us that are beyond sensual.

Somehow the mainstream definition of beauty has turned into a disoriented obsession with visual aesthetics. This is especially obvious on social media. In our genuine quest for love and acceptance, we have accidentally generated an increasing field of curation, comparison, editing, and sameness. We become attached to the identities we project out through our screens, and we begin to believe it is who we are. I feel this is a container far too small for the human soul, in all its shapeshifting beauty and mystery, to possibly fit into.

It is as though our human individuality, our true beauty, is becoming endangered. We are as afraid of our raw, unedited selves as we are of wolves. I worry that our fixation on editing ourselves is leading to an eradication of wildness, a dangerous planetary numbness.

How can we feel the unique wonders arising in own hearts when we are constantly wondering if who we are is good or “likable” enough? To hold ourselves up against a million mirrors of comparison, especially comparison to former versions of self, is to let the heart slowly wither.

But the wings of the heart can forever be resurrected.

the wings of a new dawn

A new revelatory experience is needed, an experience wherein human consciousness awakens to the grandeur and sacred quality of the Earth process.

(Thomas Berry, The Great Work)

heavenly glimmers

A man named Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley was born in the town right next to the one I grew up in, over a hundred years before me. His story is magical: he is the human who first discovered that, out of their endless infinities, no two snowflakes are alike. An impossible revelation, his gift to the world. He studied snowflakes obsessively from age 15 until he died, photographing more than five thousand different snowflakes in his lifetime… during a time long before digital cameras or iPhones.

Born into a Vermont farming family in 1865, from a young age he found himself called to a very different path than the rest of his family: he fell in love with the intricate glittering faces that are snowflakes. The passion was so great that he began studying them using a small microscope, drawing each individual ice crystal by hand. But he longed to capture even more detail, and bought a camera at the age of 17 with help from his parents. For a poor young farmer in the 1800’s, a camera was a truly miraculous manifestation. And so he began his life’s work, doing something that no one could understand.

“He also had a dreamy quality that sometimes distracted him from his chores.
The boy liked nothing better than to sit for hours and contemplate the tiny wonders of nature, a feather, a drop of water, a fragment of stone.”

(on Snowflake Bentley, by Mark Bushnell)

While many people in northern Vermont feel the hardship of the long cold winters, Bentley was enamored with the frigid months: it meant he could be with his beloveds, the snowflakes. He did all of his work in an unheated, freezing cold room, the only suitable environment for snow crystals. He was following the call of something that mystified and delighted him beyond all logical sense. Snowflakes were surely part of his mythos, his soul purpose, and every time I read his story I feel inspired to live my own life with his same tireless devotion to what I love.

Snowflake Bentley’s snowflake photographs, honoring each one’s individual beauty. Prismatic miracles of love.

I often think that a good diagnostic feature that you are doing something unique, something that is true to the complexion of your character, is that other people do not understand entirely what you’re doing.

I would take it as a compliment when people do not completely understand what you’re about, because when you think about it, we are a mystery even unto ourselves.

(David Whyte)

It is important to note that Snowflake Bentley carried out his work with the snowflakes alone, unnoticed, and certainly not paid, for almost twenty years. He remained quietly devoted to his work, photographing snowflake after snowflake despite being ridiculed by family and neighbors. This is what true love does to us, it makes us brave.

Then one day, in a moment surely orchestrated by the snowflakes themselves, Harvard University discovered his project and purchased every single one of his photographs. Then National Geographic featured his work. Then the New York Times. And now here I am writing about him, to you.

Snowflake Bentley spent his life as a solitary man, but I believe that he experienced one of the greatest love stories possible for humankind.

“Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty.
Every crystal was a masterpiece of design; and no one design was ever repeated.
When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost.
Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.”

(Snowflake Bentley)

I have my own particular affinity with snowflakes, though I have only gazed at them with a bare eye. My love for them is in the way they sparkle in the morning light. In a blank scape of pure white, the land becomes an ecstatic sea of rainbows. Sometimes I will just sit in one spot for a long while, gently swaying back and forth, watching the colors dance. Realizing they are dancing me.

There are specific hues in the snow rainbows that particularly delight and allure me. Indigo, fuchsia, blazing gold. Why these certain colors? Our attractions guide us to remember the lost fragments of ourselves. When we find beauty, we are being shown a glimmer of who we are here to become. Like Rilke, Mary Oliver, Rumi and countless other poets have been telling us, our attention to the details around us is the way we encounter our own beauty.

springtimes have needed you.
and there are stars
expecting you to notice them.
from out of the past, a wave rises to meet you
the way the strains of a violin
come through an open window
just as you walk by.

as if it all were by design.
but are you the one designing it?

(Rainer Maria Rilke,
trans. Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows)

Please remember this the next time you are gazing at something you find beautiful: this is a being you share things in common with. This is a member of your heart’s wild family. Catching a glimpse of beauty is a homecoming, a retrieval of the mystical Self we have longed to know.

What do you love about snow, or the clouds? What is it about your favorite mountain that calls you? When we talk about what we love, we magnify these forces in the world, like snowflakes under a microscope. It invites us into a state of rapture, and we remember our gratitude to be in the presence of such majesties. I dream of a world where we all speak out loud regularly, and in detail, about all the things we love.

I want both of us to start talking
about this Great Love,

as though you and I and the sun
were all married
and living in a tiny room.

(Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

Beauty is a silken ribbon flowing through you, and it is a dagger to the heart. Exquisite and excruciating, it ask us to courageously feel our place in the world. To turn toward the things that make our heart tremble. And in order to do this, we must dedicate ourselves to remembering, over and over, that who we are right now is exactly who the world has always longed for. Perfect, prismatic, strange and shining. Forever more than enough.

I pray that we all keep stalking the scent trail of what we love. That we let beauty stalk us back and redefine us, rewrite us, and crack us open into truer and wilder expressions of self. We are the snowflakes, the heavenly glimmers of beauty, unique and ephemeral, touching the world for just a moment with the profound gift of our love.

Here is a curious invitation to try writing your own living definition of the word beauty. To let it speak through you in as many ways as it wants. What does the feeling of beauty evoke within you? What beauty do you long to see? Maybe your definition wants to be painted, or danced, or whichever language your heart speaks in. Let your definition be nonsensical and full of your own wildest dreams for this planet.

I know that in writing this, I have never felt more in love with beauty, more dedicated to her cause, and sure that it has always been this world’s salvation.

may beauty stalk you
and rewrite you,
again and again and again.

for the love of Gaia,
Kate

P.S. This poem gave itself to me at dawn today, as a companion to this writing.

beauty’s language

I want to say
what is true
and wild within me.

whatever arrived with me here,
or has found me in between,
must be spoken now.

this is the only task—

to set free
each thing waiting earnestly
within you,

to let your longings be born
like children
with soft fur
and bright eyes,
their mission as clear
and ancient as your own

here, like you, to become
an effervescent
fearless messenger
of the beauty
we cannot see.

this is how
we make our world beautiful:
by freeing within us
every inclination of the heart
to speak.