Want more meaning and beauty?
Notice more relationship. To be a beholder of beauty is to be in relationship.
To find meaning is to be in relationship with story, with life, and to hold many possible meanings in relationship to each other. Turn every thing/object/person/idea you relate with over and over in your hand or in your heart, the way a baby will turn an object to examine it and know it.
This is a bottle. As I turn it , I see it is also a gift, given more than once before it came to me. My friend Jamie saved it as a gift for someone else, who never claimed it, so she gave it to me to build into the Earth Chapel. It is a projector of blue light. It is a stained glass window. It is the chapel window to the West, lighting the altar to the spirits of Water. It is my teacher, my beloved. It connects me to friends, to elements, to dreams and to the dead. As I notice all this, I know I am not separate.
How can meaning and beauty exist without relationship? It can't.
We are beings of metaphor and conversation. We see relationship everywhere we look-- and we find meaning in comparing this and that, in equating this with that.
These acorns are life itself waiting to be born again, we might say. The clouds are gentle giants keeping watch over the sky. We make story. We find and name the beauty or the thrill or the bittersweet longing in these stories.
We are in relationship at all times, often without even noticing it. In relationship with the acorns, the clouds, the longing. Our bodies are made of dynamic relationship between cells, microbes, electrical impulses, and more. And those bodies are morphing constantly through exchange with the air, water, the beings we eat, the thoughts that arise in us.
Find more facets.
Make more connections.
Life becomes rich.
Touch it, breathe it in, look and listen.
Bathe in the blue light of watery connection.