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“…Beauty, like love, has the power to change things. It can also help us make decisions and unite the disparate elements in our lives”. – James Hubbell

As someone with Libra rising in her chart, beauty and elegance have always held a central connection to my nature. Passing through many stages of refinement mydesigningeye has hopefully developed and become somewhat more sophisticated over time. Like fine wine with age.

True beauty is not relative to the eye of the beholder as we have been told, but is an innate sense of the holiness, the sacredness in a given image, object or view, be it the essence of nature, a tableau of art, a beautiful sculpture, the curvature of the human body, or a gorgeous woven textile. This is the beauty that can take your breath away when viewing a newborn infant or animal, a fresh snowfall in a country landscape or a zen meditation garden.

In Feng Shui one our main precepts is the yin/yang principal, which symbolizes the light and the dark, the strong and the weak, the feminine and the masculine, the centre of all things. From this centre we find the balance within space and create an environment that hopefully transcends our mundane daily existence. We compose a serene sanctuary that allows us to let the cares, the trials and tribulations of our day slip away once we pass the threshold.

“The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere – in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion, and in ourselves. No one would desire not to be beautiful. When we experience the beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming.” – John O’Donohue

Beauty can seem elusive in this fast-paced Internet/social media, “look at me first” world and there is such a wealth of image that it can be overwhelming – we miss the essence as we quickly drive by and scan so quickly with our “I’ve got this” or we are so obsessed with the “look at me, only me” attitude of continuous selfies that we miss the actual exquisiteness of life passing us by. To really bathe oneself in beauty, to immerse oneself in nature, to just sit and take in one image in a museum can change our whole day, our whole week if not our whole year.

A summary of Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek’s book, ‘A Beautiful Question: Finding Natures Deep Design‘ asks what the author demands,

Does the universe embody beautiful ideas? Artists as well as scientists throughout human history have pondered this “beautiful question.” Wilczek’s groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. In fact, every major advance in his career came from this intuition: to assume that the universe embodies beautiful forms, forms whose hallmarks are symmetry–harmony, balance, proportion–and economy. There are other meanings of “beauty,” but this is the deep logic of the universe–and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring. As he reveals here, this has been the heart of scientific pursuit from Pythagoras, the ancient Greek who was the first to argue that “all things are number,” to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of twentieth-century physics.

Periodically I will post and write about images, theories and ideas that have touched me in some manner and this will be my way of bringing a bit more beauty to the harshness and velocity of the everyday world. May you walk in Beauty every day.

Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.” – Rabindranath Tagore

FOREST PHOTO F DEEDERS/FLICKR

FLOWER YIN/YANG/MANDALA VISIONS