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Today's
quotation:
When
your inner eyes open, you can find immense beauty
hidden within
the inconsequential details of daily life. When your inner ears open,
you can hear the subtle,
lovely music of the universe everywhere you go.
Timothy
Ray Miller
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Today's
Meditation:
Beauty
is everywhere, all the time. We see beauty, though,
very rarely relative to its presence. Unfortunately,
even though our eyes may be open, our hearts and spirits and
minds may be closed to the perception of beauty because of
what we've learned or what we're going through at a
particular moment. This is a shame, because beauty has
the power to calm, to inspire, and to give hope to all of
us.
It's
quite a shame that we've learned to think of beauty in terms
of monetary value (art, for example), usefulness
(architecture, for example), or even sexuality--and usually
a combination of such things. The modeling industry
looks for beauty that will help them to sell things by often
presenting people as sexual objects in order to appeal to
the fantasies of their audiences. Art galleries and
auction houses often use beauty as a criteria for trying to
sell art. In our cultural view of the world, beauty
often equals profit, even though so many beautiful things
and people can bring us no financial gain at all, while they
can still enrich our lives immensely.
We
don't have to attach a price to beauty for it to be of
benefit to us. Nobody else has to agree with us that
something is beautiful for it to be wonderful for us.
The details of life that Timothy speaks of are in the
cooking, when two flavors are combined to make something
new; in the cleaning, when we pay closer attention to the
things that we see each day; in the garden, where the
vegetables grow and the flowers bloom; in the family, where
we witness others doing the best they can in often difficult
situations; at work, where we see the fruits of our labors
in many different ways.
Beauty
is there, but we don't always see it or hear it or feel
it. Sometimes we have to make an effort to see it, and
when we do so, the entire world can become new and
magical. Find the beauty in your life, and you can
make your life something new and special. It's up to
each one of us to make it a priority to experience the
beauty in our lives, rather than waiting for beauty to call
our attention to itself.
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