Beauty: Doorways Beyond Mundane Existence

How do you reach for the handle? We each have a key.

Beauty abounds. It touches our souls and makes us realize why we are alive. It gives us passion to live more fully. Beauty can stop us in our tracks. A salmon sunset in the midst of rush hour traffic washes the freeway and quells the honking cacophony. The yellow light on fibrous cactus spines; the translucent green of sunlight through a giant bird-of-paradise plant; the multifoliate yellow rose tinged in red at its tips: these are the tiny treasures that surround us and unwittingly give us reasons to strive. Or is it to settle? To be calm and accept, and let this beauty flood over us like gentle summer waters of a fresh mountain lake.

To recognize beauty we are born with receptors to receive its grace. Some hear beauty best: in the rumble and tinkle of a Mozart piano concerto, in the gurgle and lapping of a deep mountain river where its glacial bounty spreads out in high and forgotten plains. For others beauty exists in visions: the lock of auburn hair curling into the pink cheek of one’s cheerful and contemplative daughter as she listens to her sister read tales of talking baboons. I believe we are born with a bias toward certain receptors, and, as we grow we have the opportunity – or the propensity – to further develop other receptors.

To truly address beauty it is perhaps most efficient to have a lens, or a way to frame this beauty. For example, when I purchased a new camera, I found that I was increasingly seeking and recognizing visual beauty - even when the camera was left at home. Walking in Claremont Village on an autumn afternoon, the juxtaposed colors and textures of leaves would sometimes stop me in my tracks. I would hold my encircled thumb and forefinger up to my eye and frame a shot - imprint it in my brain. Strolling through the tranquil neighborhood, abandoned at this time of day by household owners still busy in a city of work, each yard increasingly became a work of art in the way the hedges were cut, in the hue of blue or coffee trimmed window frames, in the textures of spindly grass, or in bulbous jade plants with their almost human fingered branches. But it was the ownership of a camera that made me recognize all of this beauty where it had never struck me so profoundly before.

The same occurs when I hear guitar music, most sonorous to me because I have played the instrument for so long. I can recognize the minor-sevenths, the diminished chords, the shifts in tempo, the sound of all six strings. Then there is something more that deepens the beauty that I experience when I hear a guitar played. When I was young, whenever we vacationed in the summertime on the beaches of Nags Head, North Carolina, we would have campfires out on the dark dunned sands and my father would play his guitar for all. At seven, I can remember being mesmerized by the crash of man-sized waves a hundred yards into the darkness behind me, with the fire and the moonlight intermixing on the face of my father’s polished guitar as he would sing mystical songs: “Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea, and frolicked in the autumn mist…” he would sing with his eyes fixed in concentration on my brother and me crouched on our sea polished log. He saw us - but didn’t - as we observed that the music vibrating, humming through his fingertips that held him magically suspended between two worlds, between the Tune and reality. He had become a conduit for us. Then he would make the goose bumps rise on our flesh with songs of “Ghost Riders in the sky…” and he would gaze up into the abundant glistening stars, and we would see the ghostly pirate riders scrapping the mighty onyx sky, skirting high over the waves, past a purple hollowed moon, as he strummed increasingly, urgently, fully passionate. Perhaps he knew he was imprinting eternal dreams of beauty in our heads. A new set of songs blossomed during Christmas, the highlight of the event after a monstrous and magnificent meal. I was so enamored with my father’s singing I learned guitar at age ten, and caroled around my neighborhood with my seven-year-old brother for years through childhood. Why? To share the music? To share the Beauty?

Most often we need a doorway into the maze of beauty. For me, it is my writing. I can sense the world open up wide before me – coexist with its eternity. I receive “all” as I type on this early November morning that shimmers in cool sunlight on the greenery that bursts outside my picture window, all that I planted in what was once a brown wasteland, the long stalks of purple Mexican sage, the red and thirsty roses in their long-stemmed and abundant balls of red, the pale light on spineless cactus hands, the rows of ancient lemon trees that march back to a deer fence so distant that it does not exist. I write not to be published. I write to exist. I write to open the portal to let beauty flood my senses. It appears that once one portal is opened it creates a chain reaction, and all portals are flooded. The classical violins, oboes, and tubas sing a story behind me, echoing through my kitchen and mingle in my morning, unshowered hair. The fleece jacket that enwraps my upper torso is warm and safe like a mother’s caress. I am in my mother’s arms again, and the world is wonderful. Even if all of this is thrust into a file cabinet never to be read again. It is the act that is most important, not the end. I have been reading Abraham Maslow lately, who mentions that perhaps there are no “ends” at all, just means that lead to means that lead to means.

I perceive that the acquisition of beauty, or the gaining of its secret key that opens its life-breathing doorway so effortlessly, is not merely limited to the five senses. For some it involves an intellectual process, such as writing. For others, it may be reading. And if we were to break down the act of reading further we would find that for different people inspiration and beauty is triggered by different reading material. It is not merely the escape of fiction into other magical worlds that creates a false or imagined beauty. It is not what others create as much as the act of what we do. For example, Maria’s father reads pilot magazines endlessly, because he is enthralled with flying. There is an underlying purpose to his reading, although he has not flown his Cessna for a year due to a cancer operation. For him, anything to do with planes and flight will recreate for him the buoyancy in his spirit associated to the godliness he feels when he is in flight.

Or, I remember a student in my English class who would involve surfing in every assignment possible. If we did a project concerning the Modern Era in America, he would report on the early onset of the surfing craze. If he needed to read an individual book, he would read a biography concerning surfers. If he needed to write a film review, he would review “Endless Summer,” a recently released surfing movie. When surfing became involved, his success and productivity soared. If surfing could not become involved, his work was drudgery to him and the quality and quantity became likewise meek and uninspired. For him surfing was a magical doorway that simultaneously opened up every other doorway of meaningful and fruitful existence. Without this one doorway, all other doorways remained closed. Surfing was his essential artery that connected his life force to the essential experience of beauty.

We live for these doorways into beauty. This is what keeps us wading through the mundane ordinariness of daily tasks, of washing and grooming and working, of working even in areas of mediocrity, of working through even excruciating pain, of suffering through disease and even torture, for this inherent and perhaps instinctual knowledge that our beauty will arise again. Even the hope that we can one day experience such beauty again gives us the will and purpose to continue on. It creates perhaps the most profound “meaning” in our lives.