Beauty arises from life. It is the breath of the living. The power of creativity pulses within it, and this power also resides in us.
We are interwoven into a great unfolding that has led our universe from light and energy, through matter, to life and consciousness. And every blossom of this stream of life is beautiful.
There is an orchid on the windowsill in front of me. It was a gift from a friend a few years ago. For a long time it stood there inconspicuously with its flat leaves. Until a few days ago, purple buds appeared on it. They have now blossomed into a large, wide-open flower. Shaped like a butterfly, you can also see the shape of a five-pointed star in it. The purple on the petals, a delicate white running towards the centre, a light yellow at the centre and the same purple towards the inside of the flower as on the outer edges of the petals. The beauty of the flowers casts a spell over the room and our minds. Suddenly, unexpectedly, they have unfolded. Beyond my control. This is another reason why the sight is so exhilarating. Beauty happens to us. The flower has given birth to itself with the power of life. At the same time, the whole cosmos dances in it. The plant draws sustenance from the small amount of soil in the pot. It has absorbed the light of the sun, the water that I gave it and which nourishes it. And many other forces and interrelations have led to this moment, at the end of winter, being the right time to blossom. As a harbinger of spring, the time of burgeoning life.
I find the sight of the blossoms beautiful. In blooming flowers we all feel the breath of beauty. It is the form and colour that enchants us. And at the same time, it is the act, the happening, the event of blossoming itself. When a plant blossoms, it is as if the essence, the unique expression of this life becomes visible. We also feel the elemental power of life itself, which pushes towards blossoming, towards perfection.
When I look at the orchid for some time, I enter into a field of resonance. Its blossoming becomes a tender and awakening memory of the possibility of my blossoming. I feel that this awakening power of life is also at work in me. And with it, beauty.
The blossoming of this plant fulfils an ancient law of the living, an eternal principle that is inscribed in life itself: life wants to flourish. Then the plant is not an object that I look at or even admire from the outside, but a developing form vibrates in it, which I also feel within me. As a human being, I too am an evolving being and strive towards blossoming. In a blossoming life I find the space, the environment, the will to allow the gifts, talents and creative impulses that lie within me to flourish, to allow the buds of the soul to blossom. A person who blossoms in this way is a beautiful person, because life in him or her has been able to find a perfection that is not a conclusion, but rather an opening to the whole, to what is still possible. A blossom that gives itself to all life.
Birth, an
Opening from afar
Bestows me near
With the essence of time
Becoming to be
Speaks your voice
Transforms me to go home
Life is one and blossoms
Whatever is
The eternal breath
In the beautiful flower, we touch an eternal principle of life that transcends our limited and temporal existence. When we perceive something as beautiful, we feel the breath of comprehensive laws and forces. Something eternal touches us. That is why beauty can give us such orientation in the midst of a world of insecurity, destruction, conflict and upheaval.
The sight of beauty in nature, in art, in humanity and in interpersonal relationships, in ethical action reminds us that we live in a world that wants to flourish out of itself. The miracle is that the world is beautiful, even if there is a lot of ugliness and darkness in it. Beauty exists. And our soul longs for it. We seek contact with this transcendent power and presence. Even if our culture presents us with many superficial pleasures, the urge for true beauty remains.
True beauty blossoms out of life itself, as life itself. That is why no ‘cosmetic’ surgery can match true beauty. It is only external manipulation. No amount of smoothing or prettifying can replace true beauty. An old person who is dying and whose face is illuminated by a fulfilled life radiates such a lustre of life. In contrast, made-up, smoothed, standardised bodies are only a façade.
True beauty always unfolds from within, because a being, a person, a life, a work of art, a society follows the harmony of the living from within and gives it expression. That is why the eternal radiance of beauty is so unifying. The great works of art of every culture, music, poetry, may be foreign to us in their form, language or sound, but we can still feel the breath of beauty in them. Beauty can connect us. As human beings, we are all drawn to it, regardless of our culture. And in experiences of beauty, such as looking at a flower, which is perceived as beautiful in all cultures, we become aware of our interconnection with the whole of life. We always flourish as one, as ONE life.
Completely
Awake
Born into
The moving light
Creation happens
When we grow
And go beyond ourselves
Into the open gaze
That gives us
What is possible
And looks at us
A great unfolding
Beauty arises from life. It is the breath of the living. The power of creativity pulses within it, and this power also resides in us. We are interwoven into a great unfolding that has led our universe from light and energy, through matter, to life and consciousness. And every blossom of this stream of life is beautiful. The galaxies that we see through our telescopes, the plants, animals, landscapes, the human being in his artistic creation, in his life-affirming impulses of compassion and connection, in his striving for knowledge of the world and his inner self. Beauty pulses through this process from within. When something is beautiful, the creative power and harmony of the living is expressed in it. When something is ugly, the flow of life is interrupted, deadened, frozen.
In our creative being, we visualise beauty. When we consciously align ourselves with this blossoming power, feel it from within and express it in the world, we poetise our existence. Poetry lives in creating from the beautiful. The poetic, understood more comprehensively as a way of being in the world, lives in resonance with the beautiful. Every poetic work, every poetic act seeks to bring our connection to the greater life into experience and to realise it. Poetry takes the path of aesthetic attunement.
When I write a poem, something in the world touches me. I am moved. I resonate with what is. And express it. Find words, images, metaphors that express my state of mind. Even when I write about a loss or pain, beauty can be felt just by expressing a touch. By revealing a connection. When we are attuned to life in all its complexity, with the beautiful and the painful, life finds expression. And we correspond to our true nature as creative actors, as co-creators of an unfolding cosmos, as co-creators of life who are becoming aware, as poets in the great poem of creation.
Breath comes to us
Moves me from within
The ebb and flow of your being
I am the instrument
Of Your music
Filling the earth and sky
And giving us the space in between
Transforming our togetherness
When we follow beauty, our togetherness can also be transformed from within. Beauty is a whole in which the different parts find a dynamic harmony that remains in motion. In the form of this whole, the inherent connectedness of life is realised. Relationships become beautiful when our own blossoming finds space in them and when the relationship itself becomes a flower that we nurture together and transform again and again. It nourishes us. It reminds us that we are not separate islands in an empty cosmos, but interwoven with everything.
A society, a human community, can also become a space for blossoming. Then every person is given the space to develop freely. To be formed from within. To be shaped in one’s true nature is spiritual blossoming. That is why learning spaces, places of true inner development and strengthening of the heart, are the social energy centres of a community and society.
A person becomes beautiful when the abilities inherent in them – thinking, feeling and willing, embodiment, imagination and agency – find a flexible harmony. They become a process that fulfils itself in its unfolding. Then the whole of life becomes a creative space for that which is possible. The fact that our life itself is open to the horizon of the possible gives our being creative power and an unconditional confidence. A more beautiful, fairer, more life-serving and regenerative world is possible. That which we have in mind, which we sense, exercises a pull in our hearts that calls us to itself. This is a hope that is not directed towards a specific goal, but lives from the fact that our being and doing is permeated by the developing energy of life, which shows itself in our ability to follow a deep meaning. The flower that we could be calls us.
This is the beautiful call from the depths of life, in which truth and goodness are also embraced and sheltered. The true, the good and the beautiful open up the space of the sacred for us as the ultimately essential dimension of our existence. In the sacred, the wholeness of being is revealed, from which we can never fall away, and an absolute depth of meaning, in which we experience that we are woven into an incomprehensible mystery of life. We marvel. We feel awe. Beauty vibrates and reveals itself in mystery, wonder and awe. We come close to the unknowable ground of our being, which is more intimate to us than all the characteristics that determine our individuality. At the same time, we are a unique expression of this all-encompassing whole. A blossom of great life. This is the creative beauty that we are and seek.
Because we can see the beautiful, be moved by it, fall in awe into the silence, look with reverence, we partake in the beautiful. The aesthetic sense is within us and in it we are one with the beautiful that shows itself to us. An aesthetic life is touchable, it is a sentient, perceptive, poetic existence. It rejects the anaesthesia, the insensitivity, the numbness of a culture that does not want to feel what it is and does. Through beauty, we can awaken to our humanity. And we can poetise our world.
My eyes return to the orchid at the window, which has helped write this text. Like every flower, it calls us inside into the creative force field of blossoming, from which we can re-enchant our life, our relationships, our thinking and feeling, our being and doing.
Let us look at each other
In the sparkle of the encounter
The horizon opens up
A shared present
We feel freely sent
Together we are carried
And create the land
Future
It blossoms
Now
Mike Kauschke (*1972) is an author, poet, translator, editor and dialogue facilitator. He practised Zen Buddhism and has been exploring an integral, meta-modern spirituality for many years. After training as a nurse, he worked in naturopathic and anthroposophic clinics and in hospices in Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt. He then turned to writing, initially as a translator, then as a senior editor of the magazine evolve, a freelance contributor to the online magazine Ethik heute and an author of books on Poetic Art of Living. For many years he has been involved in the community of ‘evolve World’. Publications, among others: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Welt (In Search of the Lost World, 2022), Im Gespräch mit der lebendigen Welt (In Conversation with the Living World, 2024).
https://mike-kauschke.de.
https://www.evolve-world.org/de/evolve-magazin
