Let Beauty Lift You

Let the beauty that we love be what we do.

Rumi

There is a little known fact that I find absolutely fascinating. It goes like this. The mind does not know the difference between what you do and what you think you do.. They have done tests on brain activity and have found that if you give someone an ice cream cone and let them eat it, and then just have them close their eyes and remember every detail of eating that same ice cream cone that the brain reacts in the exact same way. Now the ramifications of this information can be used in a million different ways but the one I want to focus on is our feelings of how we experience the world around us.. In particular today, how beautiful things effect us..

This morning I received an e card that was accompanied by the music of Chopin,"Valse Brilliante Eb". This is a beautiful piece, bright and uplifting just filled to overflowing with joy and lightness and fun. Visions of fairies dancing and swirling in fairy dust came into my mind. I was filled with such joy, I was almost giddy from the experience. As a matter of fact I find myself smiling again and re-feeling that wonderfilled delight as I share it with you. It was beautiful, absolutely beautiful, and the beauty filled me; completely filled my soul with joy and my heart danced.

My mom wrote me a note the other day, she and my dad had gone on a tour of a glass blowing studio and then a stained glass artists studio. She made a statement about how all the beautiful colors and creations had filled her with joy enough to last her a few days. She experienced being lifted by the beauty around her, and she was filled. As I read her descriptions of all the magnificent things and how her heart was filled, I became filled with her joy. I could feel the lightness and fun from her words. The joy of the beauty she felt was spreading, because that's what beauty does.

After musing on this beauty thing for a bit, I'm thinking this is important stuff, maybe a key to helping me find my joy even when I'm very sad. If my mind doesn't know the difference then if I look for beautiful things around me and I go back in my memory files to moments when I was experiencing the joy of something beautiful then I can with my own choice of thoughts fill myself with that joy. I can lift myself up and out of the pits of despair with my choice of what to focus on.. I can go to places that are beautiful to me and know my heart will be lifted. I become that which I see. Oh joy, oh rapture, oh giddiness and yes. All of a sudden I'm filled with power, the power to choose what I will look at, knowing that that choice will then dictate how I feel..

Try it, go ahead, I dare you. Right here, right now, as you sit reading this. Think... Think.. Think.. What is the most beautiful thing you can think of.. What is the most beautiful sound you've ever heard. When was the most beautiful moment you've ever experienced. Go ahead, take your time, find that memory. Let yourself delve deep into it, every little detail, each nuance and feeling within it, allow yourself to be drawn fully and completely into that space and time. The more detailed you can be with your memory the greater your re-experience of it will be. Can you feel it? I know you can. Is it lifting you? Be in your moment.

To look at beautiful things, to listen to beautiful sounds, fills us. It's an incredibly powerful tool this beauty around us. Now I know that the world is full of ugliness and anger and pain and suffering, all of those things exist simultaneously with the beauty. Maybe they are there to help us appreciate the beauty. If everything was wonderful and beautiful and lightfilled and there was nothing else, would we be able to appreciate the beauty as much? I wonder about things like that, I wonder a lot.. Like the light, if there was nothing but light, would we see it as fully as we do? Or would we maybe take it for granted, after all there would be nothing to compare it to. It's just a thought.

Ok here I have to put in a plug "The Little Soul and the Sun" a children's book by Neil Donald Walsch. It's one of the best examples of this I have ever seen. I recommend it for every home with or without children in it. It's an absolutely beautiful story, that has the power to change lives in great and huge ways.. Try it, you'll like it.

So if beauty fills us and we can choose what we look at, how much power does that give us over how we feel? I'm thinking maybe all things Beautiful are treasures to search for and go after like life itself. It's all around us, all the time, the dainty blossom of a violet, the clouds as they float across the sky, the birds singing in the morning just before dawn, music as if drifts through our days, our favorite colors, the sound of a loved ones laughter the feel of the wind blowing through our hair, All beautiful all having the potential to fill us with joy.

OH! It lifts my heart to think on these on things, and all of a sudden I'm thinking how full my life is, how wonder filled each moment could be, If I but choose more carefully what I want to see. Could it all be that simple, we'll see, yup we'll see.. If we are what we eat, then beauty will be my diet.. If each moment is my choice, then for this one I'm choosing to go after all things beautiful, like I would go digging in my yard if someone guaranteed me that there was a million dollars buried there.. Wow, how incredible this gift might just be. This giving to myself of the beauty I see. Yes, oh and yes I hear my heart singing. What gifts to myself I could be bringing..

Let all that is Beautiful be the greatest of our treasures. Happy hunting..


Please share your greatest most beautiful moments here if you like. Sharing beauty spreads it around. So lets start an epidemic.