“Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite.  Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law, it is a companion of the soul”

– George Bancroft

We learn at quite a tender age to judge things as beautiful or ugly.  How we judge depends upon our experience among other people who also judge.  Often we see things that are familiar as beautiful and unusual ones as ugly.  We use our senses to look at something — or someone — and see their external appearance.  We use our ears to hear the words of others who also look with critical eyes for differences they see as flaws and then offer their opinions regarding the acceptability of what they see.  We use our fingers to touch and see whether the surface is smooth or irregular, soft or hard, sharp or dull.  We carry with us all the experiences and all the judgments we have made and heard and learned; and when something new comes our way, we then proclaim it beautiful or not.

We are born with Beauty — the image of the Infinite — as a part of who we are.  True beauty lives within us, and it understands the incredible way that each piece of Creation is a vital part of the whole.  As we develop our egos, we build ourselves up to be greater than our part in the universe and begin to judge beauty based upon the standard of ourselves rather than the harmony of the whole.  It is an ugly thing that we do when we reject a piece of Creation because it differs from the short-sighted view we have fashioned in our own likeness.

True Beauty is “a companion of the soul.”  It sees the order and the harmony that was created in a world where every creature has a part that magnifies the magnificence of every other piece.  It sees the colorful peacock and the wart-covered toad as equally beautifully created parts of the infinitely interdependent universe we inhabit.  It is the whole of creation that shows us true Beauty.  When we feel the wonder of taking our place as one grain of sand on an infinite shore or one droplet of water in an infinite ocean, it is then that our souls once again are called to true existence and the Beauty within us resonates with the Infinite source that called us to be.