ENDLESS FORMS MOST BEAUTIFUL

 

For a long time in the life of this Miranda thingie, it seemed there was a world divided into beauty and non-beauty, things and people that were “beautiful” and those that were “not beautiful.” The Miranda mother once told me at a relatively young age that I was “very pretty but not beautiful.” Mother would always classify the dancers in her daughter’s class according to their looks, and let me know who were the “real” beauties. When a young man would say I was beautiful, I would correct him, remembering my mother’s words. 

 

But one strange day, the whole world of what was “beautiful” and “not beautiful” seemed to change, and all that appeared began to somehow transform itself into a kind of beauty that was radiant, luminous, and far beyond any idea of beauty that I ever had.

Somehow, “this” happened --- madness or liberation; the names seem not to touch it but only make it sound like something happened to someone, and that is felt to be as real as the stories of Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks ...

 

But the beauty seemed to expand until this aliveness was completely infused by it, colored by it, flooded and drowned in it; the beauty enveloping all that appeared until there was no place it was not, the beauty overflowing like a tsunami not just in sunsets and flowers and smiles, but in crowded streets, in Nazi teenagers yelling threats, in bombed out buildings and war orphans, in stray straggly cats and pimps and whores, in a dying woman's scarred face, in a man who said he wanted to kill me, in all that appears, without exception, in the ephemeral and dream-like aspect of all that simply is and can never again be seen as separate --- the beauty, like a kaleidoscopic whirl of wonder and awe without things or beings, including the apparent writer of these words that feel written by life and love itself, and not even that can be found…

 

Beauty that is the light and the shadow, and there are no such separate things, for the light is the shadow is the light and not even that at all….

 

It is not the kind of beauty we seem to have been taught to see, but like love, beauty is the word we have, however inevitably inadequate, as much as any words can be related to any other words, which is not much at all… 

 

.....as Rilke said, "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and are awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying."

And there are only ever angels and there is only ever this beauty that is the end of separation, the very end of what we are...and are not, my most beautiful beloveds. 💖