Friday, February 22, 2013

Everyday Spirituality: Beauty.


{ this is my normal caution for readers coming here to read about anomalies. This isn't one of those days. On rare occasions I post something about the felt presence of the spiritual in ordinary circumstances that any of us experience. Some folks are uncomfortable with "too much poetic spirituality" so I'm putting out the warning. Just wait until next time and I'll be back to "abnormal". I'm reading something from Ivan about a UFO case and may try to make sense of it then.}


But for me this is at least as important.


There are those who find it difficult to feel the Spiritual on a day like this, but for me it permeates everything. Like the Minnesota folksinger, Peter Mayer, sings: " Now, the challenging thing becomes, not to look for Miracles, but finding where there ISN'T one". The whole Creation is one Great Miracle Act, and you can feel the presence and hear the Voice that brought it all about if you just open eyes, ears, soul and listen.

That chilly scene is dense with beauty. What "beauty" is I don't know, and will never know. But it's there.


Philosophers across the centuries have failed to understand beauty, and science's efforts are even more off the mark. I'll not try. There just seems to be a certain "rightness" about the beautiful, something more than the subject of the beautiful display itself. That "beyond" touches us with its rightness, and "communes" somehow. One feels that the beauty "comes into you" if you let it, and makes you feel more whole.


Despite the gorgeous glory of Ms Gene Tierney above, beauty isn't at all about gender attraction of the animal kind. In fact, that is almost precisely NOT what beauty is about. Beauty CAN be in the gorgeous, but it can be in the decidedly NON-gorgeous. I was sitting outside enjoying this "beautiful" wintry day and along came "an old friend". For years I have watched this old black man shuffle along walking his old black dog. I hadn't seen him for quite some time, and hoped he was doing well. There he was: a big hello, a smile, a how're you doing?, a that's great!. It was right. It was fine. It was beautiful.


The Lord was giving me great privileges today. His wonderful Creation, the Old Man and the Old Dog, the snowflakes and the exercise of shoveling them. There were marvels everywhere. Just beside my outdoor chair stands a table. Just a couple of days ago it was perfectly snow-layered, and, yes, beautiful. Yesterday the slight warming created the phenomenon that you see: the snow had crept back "just so" all around the edge.

The scientist in me knows that this [really amazing when you meditate upon it] regularity is caused by fundamental physical laws. The frontier scientist in me knows that these laws are expressions of physical law laid down far back at the very beginning of the Universe. The spiritual person, who IS me, knows that I am in the presence of the still-operating Creative Word of God.

There It is, in the most ordinary of things: God's Voice still speaking.

"The challenging thing becomes, not to look for Miracles, but finding where there isn't one".


The continuing sounds of those Words can be heard and seen everywhere if we just let ourselves open to them.

Marvels. Marvels uncountable. Even in the Old Man and the shoveling of the snow.


Blessings folks. As the Pieman says: God makes The Apples; I just make the Pies.


8 comments:

  1. Mike,

    A lovely and moving essay, especially coming in a cold, difficult winter that often generates dark-night-of-the-soul reflections. Yet as I look out the window to my immediate left and gaze into the snowy backyard, I am reminded of the beauty, too.

    One small dissent, however: there is beauty in sexual attraction, too. I think Gene Tierney was hugely sexy, and seeing a picture of her makes me happy.

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    1. Hah!, Jerry. Far be it for me to "split Infinities" but the glorious Gene Tierney's iconic beauty and the raw animal response I feel while looking at her are, I'm sure, two different things [one doubtless helps trip off the other]. My guess is that I could see the same "amount" of beauty [as I am speaking of it here] in an old lady Gene Tierney [IF she was in real life a beautiful soul] as in the young goddess-impersonating Gene Tierney Imagery of the movies.

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  2. Sometimes it feels to me like this beautiful planet is isolated and alone in space. At other times, it's more like we're just snuggled in the bosom of a fine star and should be counting our blessings.

    It's this time of year when I see the morning sun in the rear-view mirror and get that tingly sensation of what 'awe' really means. Starlight shining and frost on the ground.

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  3. Mike, what a beautiful and inspiring note that you have written. I have read many of your sojourns into the spiritual world and have found them peaceful, relaxing, and yet still thought provoking.

    I'm visiting my daughter in NYC and I read your essay out loud to her. She has read much of the book, UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry, so she has now seen two sides of your writing ability. She really liked your poetic writing. Perhaps you should gather together some of your written wisdom and splash it across a book so more can read your thoughts. I'm serious.

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    1. Humbled by the sentiment. This next comment might be arrogance or some other mistake of the mind, but it certainly is not intended to head that way: when I write as a researcher, that's me; when these other things are written, something else seems to happen, the "pen" takes its own head, and the result is never "planned". So I don't know if the "poetry" meditations are exactly "me" or not. Again, I apologize for even thinking about it this way ... it just "seems" to be true.

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  4. Makes perfect sense to me. Perhaps your "researcher" writings are from the mind while your "spontaneous" writings are from the soul.

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  5. Spiritual beauty is all around us Creative words of god he hears what we all have to say. Spiritualism is a beautiful thing capture the unknown there is another world out there.
    I truly feel something happen to me. I feel things and my life is connected to Numbers everywhere like there's messages telling me something.

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