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Beautiful and Sacred

Perhaps I am unique in that this isolating year has made me more reflective of beauty. I read an essay on the aesthetic response in psychology and it suggested that humans naturally gravitate towards the beautiful and the sacred. More beautiful passages keep finding their way into my psyche.

There are moments in life when time seems to stand still—moments when we find ourselves transfixed, and eventually transformed. These moments can be cosmic in scale, as reflected in the awe that we feel when beholding a rare solar eclipse, or an approaching storm. These moments may also be quite intimate, but no less moving, such as when we witness an animal emerging from hiding or when we hear an exquisite song. We recognize, and always remember these moments because they are announced by bodily sensations; we gasp, our hearts beat faster, and tears often flow.  Our bodies tell us that the ordinary has given way to the extraordinary.  These experiences are best described as “aesthetic,” as we find ourselves living, at least for a few moments, as creatures that are gloriously and achingly alive.1

I wonder what it means to be achingly alive:

I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the edge of the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge it into a delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unawares. The ebb and flow of the water, its continuous yet undulating noise, kept lapping against my ears and my eyes, taking the place of all the inward movements which my reverie had calmed with9in me, and it was enough to make me pleasurably aware of my existence, without troubling myself with thought.2

Yes. I feel these passages in my soul and I want to be achingly live.

  1. https://www.pacificapost.com/soul-stands-ajar-aesthetic-encounters-portals-wonder-meaning
  2. Griffin, John. On the Origin of Beauty: Ecophilosophy in the Light of Traditional Wisdom. World Wisdom Inc. 2011. pg 82
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Pondering Eco thoughts

In my reading this week, these two thoughts have been rattling around in my head. I am wondering how they are connected, if they are and where will they take me.

Joseph Campbell in Pathways to Bliss, Mythology and Personal Transformation says

There lives in us, says Durchheim, a life wisdom. We are all manifestations of a mystic power: the power of life, which has shaped all life, and which has shaped up all in our mother’s womb. And this kind of wisdom lives in us, and it represented the force of this power, this energy, pouring into the field of time and space. But it’s a transcendent energy. It’s an energy that comes from a realm beyond our powers of knowledge.

In Ecopsychology: Eight Principles, Theodore Roszak says

If ecopsychology has anything to add to the Socratic-Freudian project of self-knowledge, it is to remind us of what our ancestors took to be common knowledge: there is more to know about the self, or rather more self to know, than our personal history reveals. Making a personality, the task that Jung called “individuation,” may be the adventure of a lifetime. But every person’s lifetime is anchored within a greater universal lifetime…the needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet.

I feel like these are both saying the same thing. What is present in the seed to create a tree, or a human is the energy of the universe. How can I use this without feeling very small and insignificant?