Someone asked me a few days ago, “What makes a flower beautiful?” and my first response was, “The color.”
Then I was asked, “What makes a color beautiful?” and I had to really think. It’s been four days now since that question was asked and tonight I finally have the answer. Light.
Without light, we cannot see color and we are left in darkness, right? So what happens if we close our eyes and cannot see? Well, we have drops of lights that shine under our eyelids that move around and so light continues to exist. But what about inside black holes or in places where light becomes trapped? Is it still beautiful?
So if light = beauty… then what is darkness? Is darkness supposed to be the opposite of beauty? I thought about that really long and hard, because black is one of my favorite colors and darkness to can be extremely beautiful however, that’s not true blackness is it? After all, if we see something black, then our eyes are open, thus bringing in LIGHT… right? So — in essence, as long as we open our eyes, everything is beautiful.
Tonight I walked outside (today was our day off from class, so we had time to ourselves) and really made an effort to appreciate nature’s beauty. The sidewalk seemed beautiful as I noticed the cracks and the way the grass hits the edge of the concrete. The palm tree leaves that drip little droplets of water from the rain from earlier. The little lawn lights that line the sidewalk that allow us to see - as well as are beautiful. And I noticed the grass underneath the light that seemed to beautiful because it was LIT… and the further I walked away from the light, the less beautiful it became. So perhaps light IS beauty… or to me, it was.
I meditated out by the ocean late at night and appreciated the light of the insects that seemed to twinkle as they flew around, the sea turtles lit up often as well, glowing fish seemed to come alive, the lights from cruises and sailboats seemed to call out to me, the lights from nearby hotels and homes I could see from my perifial vision… I never really noticed the light before.
Light is everywhere. Well, except where light becomes trapped. So if a person becomes trapped, does THAT equal the opposite of beauty? If someone is in a cage and being dominated in darkness, can it still be beautiful? Yes… because there can still be sound.
So what if sound is taken away… can there still be beauty? At first my answer was no, but then I remembered Helen Keller saying that there is beauty in things you touch. And I remember times in the past where I would close my eyes and without hearing any sounds at all, have run my hands over a girl’s naked body or felt the moistness of her soft pussy and to me it was one of the most beautiful, intimate moments of my life. So obviously, TOUCH by itself can equal beauty.
Assuming that light is beautiful (any time we open our eyes), and sound is beautiful (ocean, whispers, words), and touch is beautiful (softness, hardness, texture, wetness) — then in essence, isn’t everything in the world beautiful?
So if EVERYTHING is beauty, then WHAT is it? Can beauty be defined? Is there such a thing or is beauty the word we describe about something when we finally reach that state of connection?
These photos are experimental shots taken at night.
Love
Isabella
xoxoxox
Its sounds like the people around You at the conference have really opened Your eyes to alot of new concepts and its quite wonderful to see You embracing them.
A while back i was a kind of council carer for kids, and one day we had a blind man come in to the day camp to talk to the kids about blindness and i remember one of the kids asking a question that had never occurred to me before. He asked the blind man what he can see? i had always thought that being blind was being in total darkness and pure black, but that wasn’t the case. His answer was he see’s nothing not even black since that sense does not exist at all.
To this day i find it hard to get my head around the concept that someone who could once see does not even see total black something most of us represent as nothingness.
I have always thought of beauty as composition, regardless of the object, texture, sound, if You see it or hear it touch it in the perfect spot and the Perfect time then anything and everything can be beautiful.
Example its 4am in the morning and a bird is singing outside of your window and you want to sleep, it can be the most annoying noise in the world, that same bird singing on a clear and perfect day standing out on a balcony overlooking the hawaiian tropics after you have just had an intimate enocounter with the girl or guy of your dreams and it can be the most beautiful sound in the world.
In terms of Visual Beauty i think Richard Averdon’s (excuse the possible spelling error with his surname) black and white grain portraits taken on a plain white background, old men, old women, bucktooth underbites, overbites, balding, tatty hair…whatever, but with the light, composition set just right the images can be breath-taking.
sincerly
kay
this reminds me of plato’s allegory of the cave
The flower is not beautiful, our brain interprets our vision and causes us to experience emotion. The old saying ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is the truth here. For me the beauty of a flower comes from something naturally occuring being simultaneously fragile, with bold, contrasting colour (to it’s environment). Many flowers smell wonderful - soft and delicate and like nothing else. But it takes a human brain to combine the senses and memories available to it, to call it ‘beautiful’.
Beauty is our wonder at what we could not imagine or create ourselves. It’s rainbows, sunsets, new colours, art, music, the smile of of girl, the grin of a boy. It’s poetry, honesty and the love given to us by others. It’s what we think we lack in ourselves.
When we look at pictures of the elephant man, photons travel from the pictures into our eyes. When we smell rotten food, gas particles enter our nostrils. The scratching of fingernails across a blackboard sends sound waves into our ears. Our fingers nerve endings are tweaked by the touch of a boiling saucepan. All these things stimulate our senses, but only a zen buddhist (or maybe goths and emos) would find beauty in all that pain, damage, decay, contamination and disease. Our instincts are to back away and run.
I suppose beauty is when our senses bring to our attention values and experiences that we embrace, whether it’s light that displays the shallow physical beauty of fertile youth, or the primitive soft warmth of female breasts, or maybe taking in the whole of nature can appeal to our values of curiosity, discovery, learning, variety.
I suppose I agree with everyone above that beauty is when our senses take in information that we are conditioned by our genes and life experience to value.
One thing I find beautiful about light is that when you really look at a person, rather than a picture of a person, it means that light particles/waves have actually bounced off that person and entered your eyes. It’s sort of intimate.
eb
Kay,
I wanted to let you know that after you made your post, I shared your example with some classmates and they thought you summed it up pretty well… many agreed with you. Thanks for that!
I’m not familiar with that — do you know a place I can find out more about it?
what we think we lack in ourselves…
hmm… I never thought of it that way… I like that.
the last part about what you wrote (light bouncing off a person and entering your eyes) actually turned me on. I swore to myself I wouldn’t get turned on by reading about light, photos, particles, etc. but you always seem to know what to say. Insightful and sexy… as always.
These past several days, I have found beauty in even the smallest of things. The world seems to be opening up to me in a completely new way. I like it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave