When Your Inner Eyes Open-Daily Meditation 2.13.23

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

Daily 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, spirits, and minds may be closed to the perception of beauty because of what we’ve learned or are going through at a particular moment.  This is a shame because beauty can calm, inspire, and give us hope.

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 to appeal to the fantasies of their audiences.  Art galleries and auction houses often use beauty as a criterion 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. They can still enrich our lives immensely.

We don’t have to pay the price of beauty for it to benefit 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, hear, or feel it.  Sometimes we must try to see it; 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 unique.  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 it.

Questions to consider:

Where have your lessons about beauty come from?  Can you trust those lessons entirely?

How might being able to see and feel beauty benefit you?

Why do so many people see beauty as something they can profit from?

For further thought:

As I experience it, appreciation of beauty is access to the soul.  With beauty in our lives, we walk and carry ourselves more lightly and with a different look in our eyes.  To look into the eyes of someone beholding beauty is to look through the windows of the soul.  Any time we catch a glimpse of the soul, beauty is there; any time we catch our breath and feel “How beautiful!” the soul is present.-Jean Shinoda Bolen

If you missed Friday’s Daily Meditation, it is right here.