Drink beauty - Redone

As I mentioned in the 'oops' posting, part of the original post for Drink Beauty became lost in cyber space. After reading it today and then mulling on what a friend said, I simply edited a few things and rearranged and edited the last couple paragraphs. Hope you enjoy.

Many, many years ago I was in the midst of an emotionally difficult time and so my morning patio time prayers seemed to be composed primarily of 'Please show me a way to feel better God. What should I do God?" Morning after morning I pleaded to be shown some action I could take that would lead me to a different place emotionally.

I suppose sooner or later I ran out of breath and began listening rather than just pleading, for an answer arrived with simple clarity, in the voice I recognized as coming from deep within my being: drink beauty. Two words ridiculously simple in their intention and yet containing an action that was not on my personal radar at the time: drink beauty.

At times I can be ridiculously concrete in responding to directions and so my response to the injunction drink beauty was to head to the library and root around in the art section where I found books full of glorious pictures of beauty. I checked out some selections and spent part of my patio time each day simply leafing through the books drinking the colors and forms of beauty artists had created.

Yesterday on my way down from camp I was sitting outside a restaurant where the view of Thumb Butte was glorious. As I starred at the outcropping of rock rising into the sky: drinking in the beauty of creation, I remembered an incident at a parish family camp held at Chapel Rock when the boys were quite young. Possibly this was the first time we were attending family camp because after lunch people talked about going to 'the tubs' and I decided to go there with the boys too, but for whatever reason we weren't organized in time to leave with the group and so I was given directions.

Now, giving me, one of the most directionally challenged people I know,directions to a place hidden in the rocks and trees of a camp in a forest area I was completely unfamiliar with falls into the category of foolishness. Within a ridiculously short period of time I, and my three young sons, were completely and utterly lost. Despite the fact that I knew I was lost, I was determined to keep going and so I kept moving and becoming more and more lost. Soon everything around me seemed totally unfamiliar. To say I was panicky is an understatement: a thoroughly urban mother lost in woods with three small urban boys, I was actually terrorized. Finally I simply stopped and told the boys I needed to think for a bit and figure out what to do next. Luke, who at the time was maybe four years old, pointed to Thumb Butte sitting solidly against a gloriously blue sky framed in tree tops and said, "look at the beauty Mom and you'll find the way."

Sure enough, silly as his 'direction' seemed at the time, by taking a few moments to see that the area I was standing in was full of nature's beauty, the panicky feeling was replaced with the sensible thought that since the camp was actually situated in a populated area, we therefore were not lost in a wilderness {which is how I had been feeling}. As this awareness of reality settled into my mind, I saw the telephone wires strung from their poles and realized that if we headed in their direction we would most likely come to a road close to camp. We did head in the direction of the wires and soon came to a road with houses where a nice person let me use their phone and we were soon rescued by amused old-timers of the camp.

Yesterday afternoon after unpacking the piles of bags and boxes from two weeks away from home, I was clearing a bookshelf to create a place for a gift the camp's program director had given me. moving the books I saw one that intrigued me and so I flipped through it's pages: "There is a sense of being taken out of ourselves when we see beauty." The words leaped off the page and, as happens so many times, I was astonished at how a truth I had been reminiscing about just that morning - the sensation of having panic removed as I took a few moments to experience the beauty all around me - was confirmed a new way.

Drink beauty and Look at the beauty and you'll find the way: both of these phrases reflect a truth about the how of living that seems essential if we humans are to not become lost during times of emotional chaos. I tend to think of emotional chaos as an experience of live wires tangled in my belly, glowing neon color and pulsating with energy that seems in conflict with the energy of the nest of wires it lays in. When I have this experience of emotional chaos, as these conflicting, pulsating energies boil within my self, a part of me always begins to panic as a sense of powerless over these tangled energies grows into the fear that there is no way out of what I am feeling. In the experience of emotional chaos I always become caught in the confines of my single self: a self that is tangled in an emotional reactions which feel overwhelmingly lonely in their confusion.

Being caught in the confines of emotional chaos causes an anguish in the human heart that often feels all encompassing. Ask any woman who has experienced the labor necessary for birthing new life and she will tell you that while she is caught in the grip of the contractions needed to move new life through the birth canal, there is nothing else happening in her experience of living at the moment. Because of this truth about birthing: (birthing any major piece of life for that matter, not just babies) when we attend classes about how to do labor, we are taught breathing techniques. When I myself went through this process, it wasn't until I was in my umpteenth hour of labor that I realized that the 'breathing' doesn't actually lessen the experience of the contraction, rather it is the focusing away from the pain and into the structured ritual of breathing that makes the process more bearable. By deliberately choosing to begin to breathe as I was taught when another contraction began, I was able to focus away from the 'complete' experience of being in pain and add another element to my experience, an element that I actually had some control over , and by this act of will, I could keep myself from panicking which is the what often happens in pain: the fear that the pain will never end.

As I heard within myself so many years ago while sitting on the patio in early morning light and pleading to be given a way out of my lonely self, the answer is to drink beauty for as my then quite young son said pointing to the mountain, look at the beauty and you'll find the way. Experiencing beauty deeply, that is paying close enough attention so that you are drinking in what your eyes see or your ears hear, takes us beyond our self. Beyond; a lovely word indicating past or outside of: past the pain, outside of the self in pain, beyond the confines of loneliness.

What never ceases to amaze me about this truth contained in the choice to engage beauty is that we are not being asked to do anything difficult: to change the feeling of the moment, all we need do is to lift our eyes away from the view that full of trouble and find a piece of beauty {which is everywhere - how clever was the Creator in that particular design!} and simply gaze at the beauty long enough to swallow the experience. Swallowing is essential to the act of drinking.

Drink beauty and let it fill you: do this act with deliberate intent several times a day and I will guarantee that you will be shown a new way - a new experience of - living.