Living with beauty

Welcome to The Beauty of Living! Thank you for being here. I’m excited to explore ways to live where creating and living with beauty becomes our most heartfelt offering.

Venice, June 2023.

The way we each of us value and consider beauty will be different and unique.

Lets take a look at a definition of beauty to begin:

Beauty:

an individually pleasing or beautiful quality; grace; charm

What I love about that definition is the naming of qualities. Grace and charm seem to have fallen away from the mainstream, when was the last time you used either of those words to describe someone or something. I recently returned from Venice where grace and charm are abundant. The buildings are designed to be appreciated by the eye, the folks of Venice wear beautiful clothes, there’s hardly any activewear unless you are actually active!

You can see there is an art to life.

In the book Divine Beauty, John O’Donohue writes ‘We feel most alive in the presence of the Beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul… beauty brings a sense of completion and sureness’.

‘Beauty meets the needs of our soul’, do you feel that? All souls yearn for beauty from the dusky pink shades of the autumn sunrise, a posy of flowers, our local gallery, or a gorgeous dress. The yearning is universal, how it shows up is different for each of us.

For the more soulful of you, do you just love this from Rumi: Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Rumi understood the uniqueness born to each of us but encouraged us to let the beauty we love infuse our lives. We dont need to divide, to alienate one another, we can appreciate these and let beauty blossom within them.

Thoughts: How do you cultivate and grow beauty in your own life?