Inspired tonight by Ravel's Daphnis and Cloe, an orchestral suite (it's on You Tube of course) that reminds me first of water instead of woodland, I thought about how I've never believed beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as if beauty is merely subjective, and yet to bestow the world with beauty is a human act, though, as I see it, an outrageous folly to think beauty isn't essentially there already to receive whatever I might feel.
In Sunday morning's post, I personified her, after first using the objective case, and find that telling, because beauty begins with things, but it moves in-between me and others, as if a level is reached that transcends the ordinary moment, linking me to other places, other times, other people. It's nothing I experience these days that needs succumb to awe, that enveloping of experience by something far greater I would get absorbed by. An eyelash is enough to remember someone I knew 40 years ago, and someone else left back at home, occupants of the same time and space making diurnal marks like years less relevant than the dimension above the three by which we create a calendar.
I wrote, in that last post, about service to this planet. There are many ways of doing this, all important. As a 10-year-old, I founded the Lawrence Ecology Club, and with about a dozen peers, we cleaned up trash along the Little Shabakunk Creek, and in the 50-acre Green Acres woodland near my home, which I had explored thoroughly and alone. We raised and donated money to a John's Hopkin's University whistling swan research project. Not much money, but some. This and many other ways entail service, but I had something else in mind I didn't make explicit.
On August 28th, 2016, I wrote about grand affirmation after a Lake Hopatcong outing. I had made many such affirmations for years, and I felt this trip was the last, as I presently am reminded of Jimi Hendrix, "The Wind Cries Mary," and the definitiveness of his voice on that word, last. I no longer find I have the heft of soul to bestow such grand affirmation where I go, but it doesn't matter. Things change, and bestowal by lighter forms is not only all that an older man can do; these forms are matured, saner, safer. Service without power changes nothing, but power without service well-considered is saved by the grace of God at best.
Link to 8/28/16:
Love that last sentence
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