I am a student of beauty. Beauty is everywhere, which is rewarding if you are a student of it. My best teacher is nature. Beauty in nature is different from how humans create beauty. Beauty in nature is the entirety of the natural object. It's never in a non-beautiful state. The more it is reduced, the more beauty it reveals. I was trying to teach this to my lover yesterday as she was admiring a shard of a seashell on my sacred table. The shard is just as beautiful as the original whole shell. In fact, it might be more so since its very nature as a shard could imply it was lesser than. But this is not the case. It remains beautiful even though it has mostly been eroded away. In this truth lies an even greater truth. It is nature, the natural occurrence of it, which alone can reveal the beauty of that to which it is applied. I could take the shell and, using all my tools, try to reform it into something beautiful, but even on my best day, I would never be able to reform it into something equally as beautiful as the original shell.* But nature can. Lay the shell out in nature, allow the sea, waves, wind, and sand to apply themselves naturally to it, and they will reveal what only they can, an ongoing and ever-changing state of beauty. This leads us to an even greater truth. Who is designing all these occurrences of artistic genius?
*I could perhaps carve it into something else; maybe a relief of a seascape or a pleasing form, but it would not then be a shell but something else I had made from the shell. What nature does to it is reveal its beauty, its beauty being held in all states of its entirety as a seashell.
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| The teaching shell. |
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