SleepingOrchid

Wildflowers – Beauty – Natural Glamor

DREAMS – Are your dreams so beautiful you regret waking up? Do you dream of possessing great beauty yourself, caressing gorgeous flesh, or having a glamorous lover turn those diamond eyes on you? Do you dream of beautiful places, caverns, waterfalls, chapels – that are spectacular in their glamor? We are all visual learners, attracted to beauty, hypnotized by color. Our relationship to the universe is naturally worshipful.

You Don’t Know How Beautiful You Are – We never do. People who think they are beautiful are trapped into fetishizing the ephemeral, which everyone knows is mysterious and evanescent, just like wildflowers. But there is a beauty that lasts forever and training oneself to recognize it fills our lives to overflowing with constant pleasure. Puppies doing anything, kittens doing everything, a dance class of toddlers (all doing the wrong thing), flowers coming up through cement, a piece of brilliant stained glass on a utility truck, a book of cave paintings, the swirl in our coffee, old photographs, our beloved’s sleepy morning face – once you start “collecting” you realize beauty is all around you.

Challenge – Take joy in your surroundings. Cultivate your own pleasure in the beautiful. Marie Kondo became famous for having few possessions and arranging them like jewels. Clutter is frustrating for the brain. We love sharing beautiful pictures, but aggressively “beautiful” people have taken to hogging the space. The more difficult it is to take a seemingly “perfect” picture with filters and Photoshop, the more they treasure it. Be discriminating. Think of the wildflower. Is fakery the path of joy or depression?

Danger – We find ourselves in a frenzy of “likes”. A “like” button can have a plethora of meanings, but if we don’t care, we need likes the way a drunk needs booze. Otherwise we’re nothing. Evanescent and possibly specious approval from strangers – or at least attention – how low can you go? The quiet joy of certain pleasure inside your own head as you follow your bliss – “I restore old cars” and share them with loved ones – “This is what I’m working on” – there’s lasting pleasure.

Opportunity – Artists teach us to appreciate new, strange and different beauty. Incredible as it may seem, the magical paintings of the Impressionists were first seen as offensively ugly. Lady Gaga, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, all are educators of our eye. We can become appreciative not just “ahead of the wave” but of the past – African masks, Egyptian art, illuminated manuscripts all possess a special beauty. Not only are we learning to love our past and hope for our future, we are beginning to see the natural beauty in ourselves – learning to appreciate the splendid gifts we have each been given.

Mantra – I DELIGHT