Beauty is the way that the universe makes love to us. I neither exaggerate nor blaspheme nor trivialize. An encounter with beauty simultaneously awakens and calms us, bonds us to the world, deepens our feeling of living. What else gives so much for so little effort? Or, as John O’Donohue expresses it, beauty is God’s invisible embrace.
So, was it just this morning that I woke up thinking I needed a good scare?
Read MoreThanksgiving! Now that’s an elemental innovation. And it can be as elemental as we care to make it. I give thanks for the bacterial cellular life that makes up about 90% of the material of ‘my’ body. I give thanks for the house plants that refresh and recycle my spent breath. And, while I am thanking the green lung of the planet with my red ones, I give thanks to the fish who so long ago gave me lungs, to the Neanderthals whose genes I’ve always felt sure I carried, for the music I am sure they made (read Stephen Mithen’s Singing Neanderthals), and for my new little piano, Magic, who is well named. I give thanks for my own elemental role in the macrocosmic real.
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