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Beauty in Action: Where Is She in Difficult Times?
Removing what obscures awareness of Beauty releases her as a creative guide.
Posted May 22, 2021
“These times” are not the first complex set of circumstances for humans to experience, but it may be the most intense many of us have ever known. There have been multiple wars, plagues, and climate changes over historical epochs. Yet each situation had its own configuration of complexity based on prevailing cultures, means of communication, the novelty of tools, and availability of natural resources. Many situations were limited to geographical and/or population boundaries.
What is especially noteworthy in current times is our global interactivity in forms such as technology, means of travel, economies, and national governances. The sheer size of our global population is straining Earth's resources. The sheer variety of national goals is straining peaceful coalitions. Perhaps most difficult are the information sources of questionable integrity that continually diminish the truth and dramatize fear into the public domain.
Some people are insistent on having everything stay the same as in their conflated idealization of the past. Others want everything to change quickly into a futuristic melodrama. My instinct feels that some systems will change slowly and go barely noticed while others will change at a pace that grows into an adaptive leap once the truthfully informed majority is convinced it is the best option. Meanwhile, a chaotic status quo seems to be vying with rational progress as if it’s a fight to the death. Perhaps it seems that way because there will be, in fact, a kind of death—the death of obsolete patterns of humans living with each other and Earth.
Included within current events are one battle for ownership of all power vs. cooperative participation, another battle for unlimited use of Earth’s resources versus rationing and reuse, another battle to demand one racial type versus the benefits of diversity, and so many more of what can be grouped as “exposed battles of the underbelly of humanity.”
Many fundamental ideas need to be clarified. There is a difference, for example, between ruthless freedom and responsible freedom, a difference between what is good only for me and what is good for the whole of a community, and a difference between ultra-extravagant living conditions and barely staying-alive conditions.
No wonder many may feel abandoned, traumatized, emotionally exhausted, purposeless, or even suicidal under the enormity of the transition we are undergoing. How do we keep hope alive as we move through our own birth canal toward expanded consciousness and integrative systems?
Under these circumstances, I find it difficult to answer my own question. “Is It Beautiful?” The “It” is too complex to decipher when viewed up close. Taking a distant perspective helps me alleviate the confusion. In my heart, I believe the existence of Beauty as a creative potential remains ready to participate. At this time, however, authentic Beauty seems to be obscured by layers of darkness.
Metaphorically, I feel I am in an audience watching a play titled “Beauty in Action” but the thick curtain doesn't rise and reveal the actors or story. I can only hear muffled murmurs of their presence to remind me they are still on stage. Without access to visual scenes, imaginations appear on the screen of my inner consciousness. They quickly overcome assumed determinism in their search for creativity.
I imagine those murmurs emitted by Beauty’s creative potential are seeking to awaken my own, to reach me through the obscurity so I may take action. I wonder, “How can I possibly interpret sounds that are unintelligible?”
I consider the expressive calmness of the sounds rather than the content of meaning.
I wonder, “Is this story about alleviating the pains of a global transformation by shaping difficult changes with kindness, compassion, patience, and compromise? Is Beauty’s role to serve as guidance of the process along the way? Are we to raise the curtain of obscurity to discover how to proceed Beautifully, perhaps not once for the whole, but over and over again as steps toward a goal in the process of its own evolution?”
The physical reality of change is inevitable. An astounding transformation of Earth and its inhabitants will arrive eventually. Breaking is necessary for re-making. Yet how that break or remake occurs can be influenced by intention. Questioning our own human intentions is to be encouraged as we participate in this process.
My own intention at this time is to serve Beauty. The service she encourages me to offer is to be a voice to express the needs of all eras: hope for Goodness, faith for Truth, and, most significantly, love for Beauty.
© Betty Luceigh, April 25, 2021
