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All readings are from Six Names of Beauty by Crispin Sartwell.

From English: "BEAUTY"

Though beauty has been defined very frequently and variously, it is also famous as a word that should not be, and perhaps cannot be, defined. Nevertheless, beauty is the object of longing…. Longing itself is an enduring … state of desire. So in the broadest sense, the experience of beauty is erotic, is always a wanting. Since we all long, beauty is a universal object of human experience. But to the extent that different epochs, cultures, groups, or individuals have different longings, their experiences of beauty will have different objects.

Beauty is the object of longing. We're accustomed to thinking that it is the beautiful thing that causes desire to erupt in us, but perhaps that is not always, or even usually, the case. First, we long. We may not even be conscious of our longing, but because we long, what we long for eventually finds an object in the world, and upon that thing our hearts and imaginations become fixed.

There is a concept in Jungian psychology that when we fall in love, we project the shimmering image of our own soul, our own soulfulness, upon our beloved. He or she appears to us as so beautiful, and to gaze upon that person awakens us to an experience of soul.

If we've really fallen, we believe we must have that person or we will surely die. And in a sense this is true, because we will feel dead or desolate, emotionally and spiritually, if we are not in communion with our soul.

The trouble comes when we mistake the other, the object of our desire, as the necessary source of our soul life, placing that source beyond ourselves rather than within ourselves.

In many of our experiences of beauty, there is something of this mechanism at work. In some sense, what we find beautiful is a mirror of our own inner longings and soulfulness. We experience something as beautiful and desirable because it crystallizes something inchoate in ourselves, and reveals it to us through the form of the object.

An exploration of the meaning of beauty will be, in part an exploration of a paradox: the question of whether the experience of beauty emerges from within, given by our own perception (as when we say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"), or whether beauty comes from without, given by things in themselves. There is no final answer to this question of whether the source of beauty is "out there" or "in here." But through the relationship between the beautiful "in here" and the beautiful "out there," we discover the treasure of meaning in ourselves, each other, and the world.

From Hebrew: "YAPHA"

The original meaning of yapha is "to be bright, to glow".…We might notice that the term indicates a quality of the beautiful thing or person, rather than of the perceiver: a thing … exudes its beauty. Beauty is something the beautiful object sheds or emits, like light: a thing is beautiful in virtue of what it gives. A possibly related Aramaic term means "to burst forth" or "to bloom," which is in turn related to the Arabic wadu'a (to become beautiful), as well as ward-un, (rose or blossom), and warada (blossoming tree). [The beauty of what blossoms is time bound and transient], but it is also an implication of paradise, and Isaiah promises that "The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom."

In his book, Six Names of Beauty, Crispin Sartwell writes a wonderful passage in the chapter on yapha. He tells us how he loves to show things to his 2-year-old daughter Jane because virtually anything can be a source of wonder for her. Even Sartwell's 15-year-old son comments, "I never really saw the moon until I was showing it to Jane."

But Sartwell is sure that his son did really see the moon, in his early life when his perception was as fresh as Jane's is now, and he recalls how his other son, as a creeping baby, crawled across a grassy lawn on a summer evening, reaching out for the bright full moon on the horizon, trying to put it in his mouth.

The sad thing is that, as we grow older, we become sated with experience and with impressions. Our senses and desires become dulled, acclimated to things that were once astonishing. The glowing quality of yapha, the quality of shining and blooming, can wake us up again, reconnect us with the wondrous. Sartwell writes:

The extraordinary deep-red rose at the moment of perfect bloom, the monarch butterfly emerging wet and sparkling from the chrysalis into the full light, the indigo bunting streaking in utter, iridescent cobalt toward the feeder—bluer than anything else in the world—these arrest our attention and refresh our sensations.

Part of why yapha wakes us up is not only because it shines, but also because it is ephemeral, fleeting. How soon the gorgeous apple blossoms fall in a flurry of petal snow; how suddenly the bright bird that materialized on the branch darts away and is gone from sight. They are gone the moment we have them, and for this reason, they are always perfectly new. They give us something that we long for increasingly as we grow older in life—innocence. They not only express it in their very being, but they help us recover an "innocence of eye," a capacity to really see with the eyes of wonder again.

From Sanskrit: "SUNDARA"

Of all the Sanskrit terms for beauty, the primary one is sundara. All of these terms have a spiritual valence, and the Hindu sage and writer Visvanatha remarks that the experience of beauty is "'the twin [sibling] of mystical experience, and the very life of it is super-sensuous wonder" …. The idea that the worship of God and the experience of earthly beauty could be actually the same thing is indeed profound. It coaxes us from our senses and their world toward the mystery that cannot be sensed. It affirms the world as spiritual and the spirit as worldly.

I've never been to India, but have heard many times from friends about what an overwhelmingly jumbled sensory experience it can for a westerner. The odors of incense and garbage intermingled, intense colors and sumptuous fabrics and glittering objects juxtaposed with bony hunger and suffering and dust, holy men next to street hawkers, mountain temples of deep silence and sacred song, which you can travel to only by way of a cramped, interminable bus ride, subjected to diesel fumes and pop music blaring through crackling speakers.

Our own culture worships the body, but in a strangely disapproving and distancing way, subjecting it to an impossible criterion of perfection that can be met only in fashion models, athletes, and movie stars. We try to erase or disguise what is imperfect, and we do not like to stand too close to one another.

But in Indian culture people accept and embrace the natural state of the body more easily, and are at ease in closer contact with each other. A friend of mine who attended a week of wedding celebrations for a friend remarked that it was almost impossible to be alone, that everyone went everywhere together in a tight, raucous herd.

Although it's a culture that absolutely defies simple distillations, one could say that there is a sense of the human body and the body of the world—the physical—as the residence of the holy. A deity can reside in a clay or wooden icon, or in a human avatar. Indeed, unlike the Christian idea of the incarnation of God in man as a unique, cosmic anomaly, in Hinduism, incarnating into matter is just what God does, over and over endlessly in a dizzying array of manifestations. And unlike the schism between sexuality and spirituality found in the western tradition, the Hindu icons often show their deities tenderly or ecstatically coupled.

Of course, India isn't the only culture to celebrate the holy in matter. This is just a reverie on the idea of sundara, the Sanskrit word that names beauty as a merging the physical and the spiritual into a single, "super-sensuous experience."

One might also have such an experience in a baroque cathedral in Italy, with its profusion of gold ornaments and radiant clouds on vaulted ceilings and lush iconography and stained glass. Or we might have such an experience in a cathedral of vaulted trees, in the temple of all space, as Theodore Parker described it.

In fact, we are blessed to have Parker's famous benediction as our own version of this idea of sundara, the beauty of holiness at home in the world.

Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere;
its temple, all space;
its shrine, the good heart;
its creed, all truth;
its ritual, works of love;
its profession of faith, divine living.

From Greek: "TO KALON"

The Greek words for beautiful (kalos) and beauty (to kalon) have moral as well as aesthetic force. They refer to "nobility" as well as what we would think of as direct visual beauty…. [These terms are also] connected to the idea of knowledge. All of these meanings might be brought together in a notion of "illumination": the kalos, the beautiful, is above all, we might say, what is drenched in light.

The Greek philosopher Plato conceived an elaborate metaphor to describe how limited is our understanding of reality. Plato pictured most of us—that is, all the unfortunate non-philosophers—as being like prisoners who have spent our whole lives shackled in a dark cave, compelled to face a stone wall. Behind us (the prisoners) a fire is burning. Guards walk back and forth in front of the fire carrying various objects, causing a kind of flickering shadow play to be projected upon that wall. All that we can ever glean of the nature things is based upon these vague, dancing shadows, and all that we can know of sound is based upon the echoes ricocheting throughout the space. In other words, we are incapable of direct perception of anything. We're not only in the dark, but all that we see or hear is dim, distorted, and several times removed from things as they really are.

Plato further imagines that even if we prisoners were released from our shackles and shown the real objects themselves, we would be so confused by the unfamiliarity of what we were seeing that we would reject that new reality. And if we were shown the fire as the source of the false images, we would shrink away from it and turn back to the wall, seeking the familiar. If we were thrust outward into the light-drenched world, we would cringe in the blinding light and try to withdraw back into the darkness of the cave that is all that we have ever known. But gradually, we could grow accustomed to the light and gain an understanding of the sunlit reality of things.

This metaphor reminds me of the words of the Apostle Paul, in 1st Corinthians, when he says, "For now we see as if in a mirror, dimly, but then we shall see face-to-face. Now I know only in part; but then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."

Plato was describing the process of philosophical education, and Paul was envisioning how we will be in relationship when the Kingdom of God comes over the earth.

Yet both are describing how it is possible to gain freedom from the confusion, bewilderment, and misunderstanding that characterizes so much of human life, how it is possible to finally awaken into the full consciousness for which we were born.

Even if so much of our life is spent in confusion, struggling to make sense of the complexities and sufferings of our existence, there are times when the scales fall away from our clouded perception, when the armor falls away from our hearts, when we are able to release illusions, projections, attachments and fears—all the habitual ways of defining things that actually separate us from the world and from others. For a moment, we recognize things as they are. I am not talking about the cold perception of a cynic. I am talking about the illuminated gaze, the gaze that is lucid with spiritual freedom, wisdom and compassion.

When this kind of seeing comes, what we see appears clear and vivid and beautiful. To kalon is not surface beauty as the world understands beauty. To kalon is a beautiful inner state of clarity that enables us to see beauty in the utterly real.

From Japanese: "WABI-SABI"

…wabi-sabi is an aesthetic of poverty and loneliness, imperfection and austerity, affirmation and melancholy. Wabi-sabi is the beauty of the withered, weathered, tarnished, scarred, intimate, coarse, earthly, evanescent, tentative, ephemeral. As Leonard Koren says: "the closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become." Wabi-sabi is a broken earthenware cup in contrast to a Ming vase, a branch of autumn leaves in contrast to a dozen roses, a lined and bent old woman in contrast to a [fashion] model, a mature love as opposed to an infatuation, a bare wall with peeling paint in contrast to a wall hung with beautiful paintings.

Three summers ago, Tom and I spent 10 days at a friend's cottage in the lush, rolling landscape of Prince Edward Island, off the coast of New Brunswick and north of Nova Scotia. The area where we stayed was rural potato-farming country. For generations, small land holdings had been owned and farmed by very poor but strong and proud farm families and communities, but as industrial practices encroached in the first decades of the 20th century, the old way of life began to collapse; small farmers couldn't compete, and they began to sell out and move away. Whole villages were gradually vacated and eventually razed to open up larger consolidated tracts of land for industrial potato farms.

As a testimony to what had been, scattered here and there across the landscape stand solitary, abandon farmhouses, once simple but elegant in design, now leaning precariously or with the roof falling in, stripped by wind and rain down to silver wood, windows vacant but for a shredded curtain flapping in the wind.

The whole environment of Prince Edward Island is lusciously green and gorgeous in the summer, but to me, those deserted houses standing lonely in the wild grasses were the most arresting and alluring things in the landscape. A few times I got out of the car or parked my bicycle and walked out to one of them, all my senses prickly with curiosity and my heart strangely aching with the nostalgia and melancholy that the place emanated.

Before I left the island I purchased a book titled Pride in Small Places, a photographic history of those communities and families before they disappeared. The enlarged sepia images are lifted from the old family albums, and interspersed with the first-person recollections of those who had lived on the island in the old times.

The harsh but beautiful life they describe captures the wabi part of wabi-sabi. Wabi can mean a state of poverty, simplicity, and humility, as in the existence of a farming family, as in tools that are spare in design and used until they crack or wear out, as in the weathered hands that work those tools, as in the clods of red earth that give the people their livelihood.

The desolate echo of that life, as expressed in their abandoned, decaying homesteads, captures the sabi part of wabi-sabi. Sabi is most directly translated as loneliness. It embraces starkness, solitude or stillness, or a kind of meditative melancholy that can also be sweet.

Being given this term, and this idea, wabi-sabi, has helped me to name why I found those desolate houses so beautiful. They embodied Leonard Koren words, that "the closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become."

Wabi-sabi gives us westerners a language for honoring the beauty in what is humble, imperfect, broken or passing away. We may already feel the poetry of these qualities, and yet we live in a culture that prefers to thoughtlessly throw things and people away as soon as they aren't young and shiny any more. Wabi-sabi redeems the poignant beauty of decay, which is as much a part of our reality as is emergence.

From Navajo: "HÓZHÓ"

Of the various names of beauty we have touched, hózhó is the most comprehensive, which we might explain by saying that the Navajo way of life is aesthetic at its base. But we also should simply say that beauty is not, for the Navajo, an aesthetic concept: it is not about the way things appear…. It refers equally to a state of human beings, a state of the objects around them, and a state of the universe as whole. It is usually translated into English as "beauty," though also as "health," "balance," "harmony," or "goodness"…. It refers above all to the world when it is flourishing; it refers to the community, flourishing in the world; it refers to things we make, which flourish and play a role in the flourishing of other things; and it refers to ourselves, flourishing as makers, as people inhabiting a community that inhabits a world. It is a word for the unity of all things when they are joined together in a wholesome state.

Our own culture and ethos grows out of Western, Christian, and scientific thinking. Thinkers in the Western tradition were, for centuries, keen on distinguishing and separating things: separating spirit from the body and from the natural world, separating emotion from intellect, separating woman from man, separate matter from matter by dismantling the world in the way that one dismantles a clock, dissects a cadaver, or shatters an atom, breaking it down into smaller and smaller parts, and examining those parts as separate things.

And we have learned a so much about the physical universe by doing that, and we became very industrious and materially powerful, in part because we also disconnected action from consequence, at least in our thinking. But as a result, we also found ourselves in an increasingly broken world, broken by our exploits, and broken by the fractured, fragmented way in which we see.

But we are gradually learning to see things anew. Ironically, the science that took the world apart is now showing us a planet and a universe that are intricately and fantastically interwoven. The industrial drive has given rise to a global economy and a global communications network. Through these lenses, we're learning to see that all humanity and all life are radically, inescapably interconnected.

But a strange aspect of our waking up to our interconnectedness is that it comes almost too late, when we are confronted constantly with consequences of human activity gone awry. Our sense of being inescapably interwoven in a single garment of destiny, as King put it, comes as a frightening rather than a redeeming awareness.

Our science and economics can show us the extent and ways in which we are radically intertwined, but they don't necessarily offer us a beautiful, graceful, or redeeming vision of wholeness. But the wisdom of First People can show us that.

In the Navajo sense of being, as is the case with many indigenous peoples, truth is in the whole and in the connections, not in the parts. Individual things have no life, no reality in themselves. Life is in the links, the connections and the relationships that unite the parts into oneness.

This is not only truth, but a beautiful truth, not a punishing one. It offers a vision of health and restoration, of harmony and balance toward which we can move with desire and hope.

Concluding this reflection with hózhó—the flourishing of things as they live in wholeness and relationship with each other—allows us to hold all that came earlier in one comprehensive embrace: beauty as our longing for soulfulness; yapha as the bright, fleeting things that refresh our eyes with innocence and wonder; sandara, as our experience of the holy in the sensual; to kalon, as our capacity to perceive things as they truly are with pure, light-filled awareness; and wabi-sabi, honoring the beauty in what is broken and rough and stark.

Beauty reveals meaning. Likewise, when we are in touch with meaning, we often experience that meaning as a sense of beauty.

May our perceptions be refreshed, and may we walk the beautiful way.