Devotion to Beauty: Rituals of Abandonment
My devotion to beauty is rooted in abandonment, in surrender. When I first began to articulate my devotion to beauty, I soon realized that devotion requires my full attention and all my curiosity. Devotion asks me to know nothing--to approach each moment as an unfamiliar guest worth getting to know without any preconceived definitions or judgements. Devotion to beauty requires me to abandon what I thought I knew about beauty and surrender all previous experiences as an offering of cleansing. I no longer have a definition of beauty. I have released her back into the wild where she comes and goes as she pleases, and yet, always revealing herself again at just the right moments. Her timing is wondrous.
Beauty reveals herself in the most unexpected places, often in the subtleties of ordinary life. I recognize beauty in places that others might consider mundane or even tedious. My devotion to beauty is woven into my ordinary rituals. Breath by breath, I am learning to trust the rhythms of these ordinary rituals as powerful thresholds into a landscape of beauty. Day to day, a cup of tea is simply a cup of tea; washing the dishes is simply washing the dishes; working to pay the bills, pays the bills. I stay with the rituals so that I can stay with life so that I am here, present, when beauty arrives--as she does in the smallest of moments, and I am smitten into a perspective of wonder. And so I am devoted to the ordinary rituals of living.
My devotion is an abandonment--an abandonment of definitions and expectations that the world heaps upon all of us. My devotion reminds me that there is nowhere else I need to be--my life is just right and evolves at its own intelligent pace. I simply need to show up and pay attention while in a posture of devotion--open and eager to learn. The practice requires an elegance and grace: allowing fears to become a catalyst for courage; accepting the invitation from loneliness to remember compassionate friends and relations; and taking a risk to lose ourselves in order to find ourselves.
Devotion to beauty requires variations on a theme. My ordinary rituals are not carved in stone tablets--they are writ on my heart. They are alive. And my heart modifies its own rhythms with each season, going through cycles of initiation, growth, death, and renewal. With each year, my devotion to beauty evolves, and this fluidity is visible as the rituals shift or my approach with them reorients. This seasonal rhythm allows beauty to bestow an agility within my body and soul: to dance with heartache and elation, grief and gratitude, endings and beginnings, wounds and antidotes, uncertainty and clarity as life whirls me about, making sure I see and hear and feel it all. At the end of it, my devotion to beauty will have worn my soul and body into a texture with the contours of living. And so I will surrender and offer up this textile to another generation to regenerate as a gift for the renewal.
