LITMIR.BIZ

      A Very Short History of Beauty and Ritual

      Beauty and ritual belong together. Ritual without a sense of beauty is merely routine.

      Imagine for a moment your daily routine of travelling into work. How often do you connect with the beauty around you or within you? I think for most of us, our commute to work is just a means of getting from A to B. We’re mostly focussed on the destination and rarely on the journey. An amazing experiment was carried out by a world-famous violinist called Joshua Bell.² He spent a day in a subway station in Washington DC performing some of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed. Hardly anyone stopped to tune in, apart from one young girl who slowed down to listen, until her mum hurriedly dragged her along. The conclusion of the study was that when we’re stuck in mindless routine, when we’re purely focussed on the destination, we miss out on the beauty that is available to us in everyday situations.

      It’s incredible to think that our earliest ancestors, going back a hundred thousand years, managed to find the time to mark and appreciate beauty despite living with much greater, more real risk then we do today. A Stone Age burial site discovered in France contained two women who had been buried in a ritual way with beautiful snail shell necklaces. The amazing thing about this discovery is that the beauty of the necklaces has endured all this time.

      In Ancient Greece, the concept of beauty was central to life, but it was quite clear that beauty referred not just to how you look, but equally to beautiful actions; how we act in the world can be beautiful and contribute to the highest good. The Greek word for beautiful, kalos, means both aesthetically beautiful and virtuous.

      Many indigenous cultures have for a long time understood the sacred connection between inner and outer beauty, which they channel into the world through prayer, dance, arts, ritual and ceremony. Navajo Indians have a concept I’m totally in love with, called ‘The Beauty Way’. The Beauty Way is a philosophy for life, the main focus of which is to appreciate and maintain the beauty in the world around us and in the world within us. Most importantly, beauty isn’t just aesthetics; it is also the qualities we cultivate inside ourselves. The Beauty Way blessing is:

       Shil hózhó, ‘with me there is beauty’;

       Shii’ hózhó, ‘in me there is beauty’;

       Shaa hózhó, ‘from me beauty radiates’.

      Take a moment to read over these statements and really let them sink in. When I allow my heart to connect to the ancient wisdom contained in these blessings, I’m filled with inspiration and hope. In The Beauty Way tradition, whenever someone feels out of harmony with life or in need of some TLC, they’re given ‘medicine’ in the form of beautiful ceremonies, performed by the tribe just to reconnect that person to their sense of beauty. In these Beauty Way ceremonies, songs would be sung and sandpaintings created, all for the specific purpose of healing the ‘patient’. And the ‘patient’ would participate in all of this, singing the songs, and even actually getting into the sandpainting to bring the healing to an end. This is how Gary Witherspoon, an expert in Native American culture, describes the spirit of this ceremony: ‘The sandpainting is not just to be seen but also to be absorbed, its beauty and harmony heal mind and body.’

      Imagine that! Every time you feel out of sorts, your loved ones surround you and sing beautiful songs, make beautiful art for you and say beautiful blessings for you (with me there is beauty), and your only responsibility is to accept the beauty being showered upon you (in me there is beauty), so that you can go back out into the world and shine your light (from me beauty radiates). Without consciously planning it, I was already weaving aspects of the Beauty Way in the meditation groups I held with my husband. By creating a beautiful space for friends to connect and be really open with one another, rather than the usual chit-chat we tend to engage in in our rushed daily lives, we all experienced a sense of great heart-opening and healing, as well as a stronger sense of community, helping each other to focus on what is most important to us, on how we want to be in the world.

      One aspect of beauty and ritual that can be seen throughout history is the celebration of the wild beauty of Nature. These traditions often refer to Nature as a maternal figure, giver of life and nourishment: in Native American tradition we have Mother Earth, and Pachamama is the name of Mother Earth in ancient Incan wisdom. As I experienced in Peru, rituals around Mother Nature are a means to give something back to her (food, tobacco, sweets) as a token of appreciation. I love these traditions and how they contrast with the Modern way in which we have tended for some time to just take from Mother Earth without reciprocating.

      A deep respect for the feminine beauty and power of nature underpins many such rituals. Nature is wild. She can sometimes appear serene, peaceful, flowing, and at other times she can appear angry and destructive. But there is a beauty in her cycles that I think should be celebrated. The key here is the cycles. Just think of the waxing and waning of the moon, or the ebb and flow of the tides. There is a great peace that can be found in accepting the cycles of our life, and so letting go of the idea that we should be aiming always to be more: more happy, more full of energy, more giving. As the biblical verse (Ecclesiastes 5:7) reminds us: ‘There is a time to plant and a time to uproot … a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them.’

      Beyond the cycles of Mother Earth overall, individual plants, trees and animals in the natural world have been seen in many indigenous traditions as having a spirit we can ask for protection from through ritual. In the Celtic tradition (Celts are the indigenous people of Britain), every mountain, river, tree, plant, animal or rock had a spirit which would be worshipped. The spirits of water were particularly respected as givers and sustainers of life, and healing rituals would be performed at natural springs. It is said that the River Thames that runs through London gets its name from the Celtic goddess Tamesis.

      Even though we may think today that some of these ancient beliefs seem a bit far-out, conjuring the stereotype of the tree-hugging hippy, we can all instinctively appreciate the healing power of Nature. For those of us who live in cities, we instinctively know that when we’re in need of rejuvenation we take ourselves off to the countryside, to the forests, to the seaside. There’s just something about being in nature, about appreciating the beauty of nature, including the beauty of our own nature, that really lifts our spirits and restores a sense of balance to our hearts and minds. When we’re in Nature, we can stop clock-watching, detox from our devices, clear our minds, slow down and get inspired. The eternal beauty of Nature gets captured most perfectly by the Romantic poet John Keats, whose now famous lines read: ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palms of your hand, and eternity in an hour.’

      One of the lessons that Nature teaches me is that things can be beautiful, even though they’re not ‘perfect’. And Japanese tradition has developed a stunningly simple way

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