Answer #4- Be Astounded By Beauty

Astounded! That sounds a bit dramatic. But if you are not astounded and had your socks knocked off then maybe it's not true beauty. Maybe it's just pretty or pleasant or appealing or charming. True beauty is not soothing. It can be violent and disturbing and unsettling. It can reduce you to tears or make you struggle for breath or words. It can take you out of yourself and into something so large and vast it can be terrifying and blissful all at once. Sounds a bit scary, eh?

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

We often associate beauty with people, and there it gets a bit subjective. I might think an actor is gorgeous, someone else thinks they are funny looking. I might surprise someone by saying Ryan Gosling is boring looking and his eyes are too close together, and they might think me insane. It's also a cultural thing (check out any beauty pageant for a really narrow parameter of appeal). And an historical thing. Renaissance Madonnas can be a pasty, plain looking bunch to our eyes (except for Botticelli's dreamy ladies, IMHO). Scientists try to analyze faces by mathematical proportions, like a Golden Section of features, to see if there is an ideal beauty and only succeed in creating a bland stereotype that cannot begin to explain the elusive qualities of charisma and sex appeal. Although Queen Nefertiti certainly holds up well.

But apart from physical beauty there is that whole Other out there in the world, the beautiful around us. Usually found in Nature and Art but often in small hidden things like gestures and moments and meanings.
I'm not even going to try and expand on this conversation because it's too big. I took a graduate course in Aesthetics while in college, a whole semester of trying to define was is beautiful, and we barely scratched the surface.  What is beauty? How do we define it? Are there universal attributes? Are we all born with a sense of knowing or needing the beautiful? Humans may or may not be the only creatures that can contemplate beauty but that doesn't mean all of them do. In fact, on the flip side, many people delight in the ugly and the grotesque. It's sometimes a fine line. Hence the popularity of tattoos.
My point is that we don't often seek out beauty or let it enter our lives because we are too busy doing other things. We don't think it is important. But we sense when something is lacking in our lives.We don't foster a love of beauty in the education of our children or in the culture that surrounds us. Our cities often build ugly and cheap because the planners see the dollar signs and not the quality of life. We settle for the tacky and mundane because that is what is offered us. (My challenge should be to go to a Wal-Mart and see if I can find an object of beauty). Maybe if you're financially struggling beauty is the last thing on your mind.
Every time I watch a British police drama they always end up tracking down a criminal in a place like this:

Maybe beauty is a luxury for the rich. No. It's not. Beauty is for the senses. Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. Most of us have most of those senses working. They came free when we were born.
And we all tend to drift towards one kind of beauty or another. My sister loves opera, especially Wagner and the Ring Cycle. The beauty of this aural/visual/emotional extravaganza that goes on forever makes her happy.

Myself, I prefer visual art and the physical and emotional beauty of dance. And the truly great dancers, like Baryshnikov, are a once in a lifetime moment when seen onstage.

And that's another reason the arts should be available to everyone. In schools and in public places, not just in museums and on stages. Without beauty our souls never fully open up, they shrivel up and withdraw, and we compensate by growing a hard, shiny surface and sealing off the depths.
I don't have a snappy ending for this blog so here are some small shots of beauty.

Falling Stars

Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes--do you recall? And we
did make so many! For there were countless numbers
of stars: each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall.

Ranier Maria Rilke

And here's a free tour of the art of Vincent Van Gogh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dipFMJckZOM

It's  a quickie video, not anywhere near the real thing. Not like that first moment when you round a corner of the Chicago Art Institute and there is his haunting face gazing at you, the paint so rich and inviting, your fingers itching to reach out, your heart beating a little faster, as if you are in love, and you realize 'now I am in the presence of beauty'.