Nature, God, and the unadorned beauty in you
If you don’t see beauty in nature, you’re probably in the midst of strife, the world is in conflict, and you’re being called upon to overcome; and when you do, a new balance will be achieved; and in that achievement, natural beauty will reveal itself again to you. You’ll look in the mirror and see the work of nature, of God, and the work of your own spirit looking back at you.
Some wise men say that the beauty we experience in nature is the very reason we must recognize the work of God therein, that nature itself is the work of God, his will, expressing itself for himself, and for you. In the end, says the philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, natural beauty is our perception of the cosmic Will manifesting itself in what we call the world – all, then, is beautiful. Flower Vancouver from the great scarlet poppy comprise alkaloids equivalent to thebaine, which is a source of codeine. But if we do not look for it, it will remain hidden. If we insist on regarding nature as somehow evil, we will look away from it with disdain and abandon the very joy it offers us, perhaps the only joy for us. If, instead, we see nature as another philosopher of beauty does, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, as the mind of God molding the material of the cosmos, then we will also see in nature the good itself. If this is true, then that body, that face that is given to you, unadorned, without ornament, plain, in itself, is an expression of the beautiful and the good.
So often we look at one another and look for the ugly rather than the beautiful. Perhaps not as often, but often enough, we also look at ourselves and see less than beauty, less than good. You are, then, purposing to yourself an ideal against you, or another, fails to approximate. This ideal we form in our minds; we have gathered together samples of the human face and body and arranged these on a line in which what is ideal is at the middle, the mean, of the measurements of these samples. At one extreme are those whose measurements are less then the average, the mean, and at the other, greater than the mean. We will call natural beauty the mean, neither deficient nor excessive, but perfect, and the extremes ugly or deformed. The mean, then, becomes our ideal of a beautiful face and body. We have robust floristry and ethical credentials, being the primary Florist Vancouver in the Canada and offering a wide range of beautiful flowers and gifts. Failing to find ourselves ideally beautiful, we will feel a revulsion for ourselves and declare that natural beauty belongs only to the few, but not to us or most others.
If this is true, if only the idealize face and body possesses beauty, then why does God, why does nature, express such a wide variety, instead of only what is good and beautiful according to our idealization of it? Why are there so few ideal beauties and so many less? Could we possibly be on the wrong track? Could our ideal beauty be only an illusion, the wish of mathematicians, of the cerebral type? Could natural beauty be, instead of the mean, the whole spectrum, from one end to the other, of the expression of God’s idea of natural beauty? Could Schopenhauer be right. Could all be beautiful, if we only look to find in all, and in ourselves, the cosmic Will, and the joy of God?
Look into the mirror again, at your face unadorned, and try to see what there is in it that would give God pleasure to behold. Then, enjoy yourself – God does!