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'Heart Open to the World - Kuan Yin'
Saying: To be alive is humbling, for it is so beautiful.
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God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. But the miracle is raised to the second degree when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception, is no abstraction but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reaches our ears.
*Simone Weil. Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us.
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At times, bowing before the home altar - Kuan Ying to my left, in the center Rublev's icon of the Trinity, and to the right, a hand-carved statue of the Buddha - a deep-felt sense of humbleness arises. When this happens, I feel I could bow forever - it is so lovely. I feel the wisdom of Jesus' words, "If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it" (Gospel of Luke 9.24-25).
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Henry Shukman -
I was living in two worlds. Sometimes at the zendo, or on retreats, or doing my daily sits at home, getting lost in a koan, my heart would open. Once, I was at Walmart buying a new safety net for the boys' trampoline, and while I was waiting in line my eye fell on a large-screen TV. It must have been tuned to MTV. A boy band was singing, all dolled up and trying to make an impression, and it seemed such a futile thing - to be pacing around a stage in fancy costumes in an effort to convince people they were worth watching. A shiver of recognition ran through me: Wasn't that what I had done, with books, readings, a visible career - striving to persuade an unknown audience that I was worthy of notice? Then my eye wandered down to the cardboard packing case on which the TV stood. The humble cardboard was even-colored, with a tender fineness in its texture. Now that was beautiful. I fell in love with it on the spot and couldn't take my eyes off it. It carried a truth the image-conscious lads on the TV couldn't come near. I found myself close to tears.
*One Blade of Grass.
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I lifted my hand to my nose. Skin to skin, I was feeling the nose as for the first time. I was not feeling my idea of the nose, but the nose. I had never touched this nose, not this one, though I had touched my nose likely thousands of times in sixty years. When I touched this nose this time, though part of the body, it was somehow alone itself - an aloneness-together-, and it lived; the nose was not only part of the life of the body. I had never known a nose could feel so beautiful, so real, and its realness is its beauty. I gently, seduced by this epiphany, ran my hand repeatedly over the nose, sensing its fresh strangeness - Is that worship?
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Beauty... Not something added to life. Not something sometimes there, sometimes not. Beauty... met is always humbling. One cannot long retain her pride when standing in the Light, or else she loses sight of the Light. The Light is Beauty.
Wonderful to see and be a plain cardboard box. A blessing, indeed, to be one nose among myriad noses both like and unlike it. To be alive is humbling, for it is so beautiful. And this so beautiful is powerful, unlike common ideas of beauty. Hence, while we feel the beauty, beauty disarms us, silently. This disarming is the arising of humbleness.
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The Way means closer and closer with this subtle awareness, which sees differently from our usual sight impressions, and our habitual conditioned seeing. Then, we see from the inside to the outside of things, when we saw from the outside in before, and usually only the outside. So, we see this imperceptible beauty in everyday things, or better this perception naturally arises. This seeing happens like breathing. The moments of opening, when direct insight occurs into the subtle hidden within form, foreshadow where we are walking to. Yet, to walk there, it is best not to walk there, but always now.
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*(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2021
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse. The book is a collection of poems based on mystical traditions, predominantly Christian and Sufi, with extensive notes on the poetry's teachings and imagery.
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