Saturday, December 17, 2011

Reverb11 #4 Beauty

4. Beauty
How have your standards of beauty shifted in the past year?

This question prompts me to ask, what is beauty?

What compels me to say “Beautiful?” What stops me in my tracks? What is different from what I usually see in the world?

Is it only the ugly, as it says in the Tao te Ching, or like Thelonious Monk’s Ugly Beauty?

I usually find beauty in color, colors of nature, pigment, textiles, design. And beauty in simplicity.

If my standards, if I have any, have changed, maybe it is a greater acceptance, a willingness to find beauty where I have not before. In an abandoned lot watched over by the same blue sky. In the ordinary, uniform dress of women and girls. In this moment, dissolved into a sequence of other moments.

And in another moment, maybe accepting impermanence, what is beautiful is subject to change and will emerge again, somehow.

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