Beauty as your J-O-B
What if your job was to create Beauty and express Gratitude?
What if these were your sacred tasks…the things you MUST do each day before and beyond anything else? More important than making money. More important than paying your taxes or maintaining your car insurance. More important than getting your kids to school on time. More important than buying groceries and doing the laundry. More important than fitting in, being polite and following the traffic laws.
The way the ancient Mayans see it*, the spirits are paying close attention to us humans and what we’re doing here on Earth…and they are looking for beauty. They are hungry for it. They feed on it.
They love to feast on the sweet smelling smoke of our offerings and the delicious melodies of our songs, on finely woven cloth and artfully prepared food, on tender love exchanged with flowering glances, graceful caresses and honey-soaked words. They are strengthened and enlivened by the creations of beauty crafted by human hands and hearts…and when they are delighted in this way they are poised to help us…they are moved to come to our aid…to lift us up and celebrate us with their assistance.
If this is really the way it is I can’t help but think that the spirits must be STARVING in this modern industrial reality.
The fine art of living the BeautyWay has been deeply buried in the hustle and bustle of industrial solutions to practical problems. It’s been flattened under the freight train of “progress.” Squeezed out by the need to turn a profit.
This is the world I’ve grown up into…the one that values money over worthiness…where speed and efficiency trumps craft…where we’re expected to earn our keep and feed the machine.
It seems all too easy to get drawn into the ugliness of fear and doubt these days…sucked in to apathy and complacency…wrapped up in worry, panic and strategizing because it feels like there’s not enough. It feels like we’re all striving and straining to get ahead, to keep our heads above water, and we’re all just barely making it.
Maybe it’s because the spirits have lost interest…maybe these long generations of industrial ugliness have lulled them into despondency. Maybe they’re waiting to be fed.
I, for one, am ready to feed them…Right now, right here…I am giving my life to the creation of beauty and the expression of gratitude…I am waking up into the crazy paradox of living the BeautyWay in this modern reality. It is the underpinning of my soul’s mission and the noble challenge of each and every day…
To wake in beauty and work in beauty and love in beauty and mother in beauty and sing this world alive again all around me.
*This account of the Mayan perspective is from Martin Prechtel and his story The Secrets of the Talking Jaguar
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