The aesthetic experience also comes from the encounter with others. Here, more than anywhere else, it is clear that the impression is deep and penetrating. The beauty of a person, his or her body or soul, stimulates countless interactions and emotions. We learn about others, we are the others. They live in us and we in them. In the presence of beauty, at least two attitudes, on a continuum between extremes, are possible. On the one hand, we can be closed to beauty and keep it at a distance. We might feel it brings troubling insights and changes, and we dimly sense this impact can be upsetting. It is undeniable, beauty is a risk. We risk being vulnerable, changing in ways we dare not imagine. Beauty can be uncomfortable. If we stop it in its tracks, it becomes an ornament or a piece of merchandise, at best a cultural object. Thus beauty is dis-empowered or fossilized. On the other hand, it is possible to let ourselves be moved and changed by beauty. Our aesthetic intelligence opens and extends itself. This is a harder but much richer path……Piero Ferrucci
our stormy hearts long for the sublime, rich in meaning and nuance and sweeping forevers that linger on the tongue….the essence of our truth lies in our capacity to witness the morning sun rising in to caress the turbulent silence…..may you shine into your day…
the individual self is- a fleeting meeting ground
of intricately woven relations, its nature is
profoundly participatory, but is, for that,
no less endowed with distinctiveness,
particularity.
…Joanna Macy
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your home tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
…David Whyte
