Nature’s Path of Beauty

      The Iris Season this year displayed an abundance beyond any we’ve seen in our sixteen years amid these gardens. The fragile blooms lasted long due to unusually gentle breezes instead of occasional strong winds and to a generous space of soft sunlight without heavy rain. Yet after this pleasant interlude, their well-being called for rains and then they came. This life-sustaining gift we welcomed even knowing the blooming side of beauty sooner slips back inside.

      Is it not the very transience that compels us into Presence—shearing us from attachments to a precious side of beauty, a momentary joy, or another attachment? Too easily a manifestation may be frozen into an idol that swears time can be stayed. The false self lies. 

In Raids on the Unspeakable, Thomas Merton contrasts two views of Prometheus leading us to consider our choices of how to live: A) the presumption of the false self that builds up sand-castle idols as if the lies could approach the all-surpassing God or B) ) the surrender before the image of God that’s sowed in one’s heart.

I wonder if contemplating Beauty guides one in becoming able to apprehend beyond the surface, and if this love of the divine form also then aids in discernment of the ugly, of the presumptions, the lies. Might a person thus tell, perhaps by visceral reaction to a countenance that tries to hide lies? Remember the emperor's new clothing made naked to sight untarnished. Truth is evident to clean vision like that of a child, giving discernment not yet compromised by toxic exposures to power, greed, and other distortions that spoil our divine inheritance. 

The Unity that calls to seekers flows in the holy gifts: As when Love comes through into intimate life, like wonderment at the birth of a child, like when Beauty awes us through transcendent lines lifting off iris petals on rays of light, in pearls of raindrop—these moments of being taken into the divine quality. Presence of the One, always here, now. 

The liminal edge shimmers in the prism in the raindrop on the lip of the perfect iris. The numinous shines in the mirror of the heart’s eye reflecting the true self. This grace, this great Compassion feeds the manna of certainty beyond words, known beyond the reach of reason, felt in awe in the wonder of the Presence. It’s sensed in he shimmering passage, the edge of luminosity on the precipice of nothing…

Related readings: 

William Chittick. Self-Disclosure of God . For example, p. 332- on imagination and barzakh.

James Finley. Merton’s Palace of Nowhere. “To use the imagery of Saint John of the Cross, there is a path to walk with ‘no light except the one that burns in your heart’” (p. 12).

Richard Rohr. For example on the Love that removes separation between one person and another as well as from “any other creature.” He continues: “This is something that we can embrace originally at a primal and then deeper levels of consciousness. Children already enjoy this unity at a pre-rational level, and mystics later enjoy it consciously at a trans-rational and universal level.” [ https://cac.org/we-turn-around-one-thing-2021-05-23/ ]