Finding Beauty in All Things

It was yet one more hurricane in a season filled with them, though the only one that got to North Georgia fully intact with gale force winds. The image on the weather radar was strikingly beautiful with tendrils spinning forth and an array of colors reflecting intensity and effect. I posted the image and added:

“I know it’s a mess, and a lot of ugly comes from something like this, but how beautiful it is!

Of course, it’s relative isn’t it?

If it’s my house that gets crushed, that might not seem so beautiful.

Still, there is beauty. You just have to look (and feel) much more deeply.”

A friend posted a reply that she was not so sure she could agree. After all there would be so much destruction, and harm. That’s not an uncommon response anytime we try to express the whole of the beautiful design of the creation. Especially this is true because as one spiritual teacher said to me, “We keep thinking only the stuff that feels good is good.”

On this day, a new explanation poured forth.

“Amid and beyond the mayhem, loss and grief, there is a remarkable beauty to the whole of creation. I flash back to a moment in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. It is a glorious, blue-skied, autumn day, and the leaves of the birch trees are butter-gold. I’m walking through a meadow of long-stemmed grass sprinkled with purple asters, sobbing because of a loss and heartache greater than I think I can bear.

A word arises: bittersweet. Simultaneously there is beauty and sorrow, each beyond words or measure.

There came an awareness of deep spirituality, and with it a sense of transcendence, or perhaps it was a merging with the moment. There are no words to express how wondrous it was. It took my breath away.”

Even as I recall and recount the experience here in this blog, I can feel it to the core of my being.

My friend replied promptly. “There’s a word for that in Urdu, mitha takleef. It translates roughly as ‘sweet pain.’”

Sweet pain. Bittersweet. Mitha takleef. Beautiful.