Welcome To the Cedar Grove

Wherever the goddess was, beauty was.
Beauty flowed out from her like water,
like the light blue gown she wore, the gown
that carried the sweet smell of her presence
that hung as heavy as incense in the air.
Beauty flowed from her, like her thick gold hair
that spread out over her broad shoulders,
beautyflowed out from her like light,
radiating the brightness of lightning,
beauty blazing through the world,
wherever the goddess was.

--Homeric hymn to Demeter

We do not need to know how old the goddess is, how tall, how light or heavy. We cannot trap the goddess in such ways. If we were to specify the perfection, the exact type of beauty that we sought from here, we would limit her to our merely human imaginings.

See... it comes back to the whole, 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' statement really... but according to the text of today's meditation - and to my way of thinkingthat should be that it is in the heart of the beholder, and not the eye. You can look on something with a stunning aesthetic beauty and still not be moved by it in the same way that you would be by something that touches your heart - the difference is love and the capacity to love that something which you see. That was the point of the rest of the text of the meditation... but as I sat thinking, contemplating I had to ask myself - if the difference is love, then should not all things be beautiful to someone with love in their hearts? It is extreme, maybe, but if the difference is love, and one looks on everything with love in ones heart, then by that argument everything is beautiful.

But we are human and imperfect... we don't live the life of 'saints and prophets' who are able to live that kind of existence. Even when we strive to live a peaceful and loving life, it's hard to view some things in the light of love, and therefore to see them as beautiful. We feel other things instead, things that are not always appropriate, like pity - or sorrow - of regret or something.

It's like this... I remember once walking in on my grandparents - yes... in a compromising positon. I was young at the time and was horrified. "Old people don't do that... ewwww - gross!" Now, years on - I can look back on it and actually see it for a thing of beauty. How much my grandparents must have loved one another, expressed that love and togetherness even after all of their years together. Younger people, yes - you expect them to sneak away for moments of passion together, but the older, slower and wiser of 'we humans' not so much - for them to have done so - wow... what love.

Perhaps that's another thing - as we get 'older' and wiser, we are able to see the beauty in things that much easier? I'm not certain on that - it's just a thought.

So if the key to beauty is love - what about the bigots and the haters? What does their world look like? All shade of grey, and darkness, perhaps with light and beauty coming only in their own images?

And what do we mean by 'ugly'? We can say to someone, 'that was an ugly thing to say,' or 'that was an ugly thing to do.' Do we really mean something like, 'there was no love in the words you just spoke.' or 'what you did showed no love in your actions'?

One of these days I'm going to sit down and make a study of the ways in which we use the word 'love...' and what we really mean by it.