Breaking Beauty

I’m setting up for a photo on the back porch that will show fall harvest, holding the Diné pottery from Monument Valley that will highlight the display, when a squash rolls from the bench and I move to stop its fall. Although I feel no impact, the pot shatters—as if it had long been holding its breath, anxious to break apart. I can only cry out. It’s another reach into the great Why? that never answers more than to demand further movement into the Mystery.

     I’m reminded of the reading last night from Attar’s Manṭiq al-ṭayr  (Conference of the Birds), about the sigh that goes up as a human's special offering to God. Preparing for the journey, one traveller asks about taking along a gift for the Presence, and the guide advises the seeker to take “that which is not found there. . . the burning soul and agony of the heart. . . If out of a spasm of yearning a single sigh is fetched, it carries the smell of a burnt heart to that Court” (Avery, Speech of the Birds, lines 3163-3167). The Darbandi/Davis translation has “If one sigh rises from the inmost soul, that man is saved, and has attained our goal” (Conference of the Birds, p. 177).

     We are after all but vessels waiting to dissolve; and anxious to voice our separation from the Divine, a shudder waits trembling just aside every breath. S.H. Nasr includes in the section on African Religions:

“As for the Bambara, ‘The heart of the esoteric teaching consists of the mysteries surrounding the Word. All of the universe is generated by the primal (and still continuing) vibrations that make up the Word. . .’  When these vibrations double back on themselves in thought, consciousness is established. . . ‘Yo is the silent word that ‘speaks’ all that we know and can detect in the world.’ . . . Beyond the noise of the world lies that silence or Yo, which is also the harmony and order underlying all outer discord, while man himself is the image of Yo and contains this primordial harmony and order within himself.” (Religion and the Order of Nature, p. 36)

     Beauty, of the sacred direction, flows toward the Creator. Schuon says it’s expressed in the vibration of living.

“Beauty, whatever use man may make of it, fundamentally belongs to its Creator, who through it projects into the world of appearances something of His being. Thus, one must live the experience of beauty so as to draw from it a lasting, not ephemeral, element, hence realizing in oneself an opening towards the immutable Beauty, rather than plunging oneself into the current of things; it is a question of viewing the world, and living in it, in a manner that is sacred and not profane; or sacralizing and not profanating.” (F. Schuon, Art from the Sacred to the Profane East and West, p. 23)

The closing prayer from the Navajo Way Blessing Ceremony tells of Walking in Beauty. I see the dance of yellowed leaves falling, through a mirror, to the Source.