Last night I read a most interesting thought. The author, Subhadramati, wrote that living an ethical life was more than following do not’s. It was awareness that our awareness of our intentions in speech, actions, and thoughts was really about beauty. Regardless of our actions, if our intentions were self-serving, couched in anger, or any negative state, it not only harmed the other person but ourselves. Rather than “ethics” the writer wrote of creating a life of beauty. Do my intentions create beauty? Do my intentions gift beauty to another? Do my intentions deface another’s beauty? Do my intentions, like beauty, gift life and inspiration to transcend and become?

Then, I thought how the word “beauty” has so lost its soul. For “beauty” people take toxins into their body or endure a surgeon’s knife to alter their appearance. Some starve themselves for “beauty.” The elderly, not-slim, and not-beautiful are shunned and hidden away. Our consumer fever is fueled on having the most “beautiful” object – new, shiny, screams prestige, the right logo, even though we know tomorrow someone will advertise a new model even more “beautiful.” Our public speech is not much better as we portray “our beauty” as better than another’s by defacing and refusing to listen – heaven forbid dialogue with- another’s beauty or ideas. Rudeness, shunning, and attacking others, is not beauty.

Beauty, like ethical behavior, seems to be lost.

As I sat in meditation I found myself struggling with how to sit in beauty. Then the whispered reminder of the tree’s reflection. The reflection is not the tree. Yet, without the tree there would be no reflection. Together they are beauty. I sat in stillness, like the tree knowing my thoughts, my intentions, and my heart would be reflected in the lake of humanness. I sighed to think of the pain caused by seeking what is not true beauty. I breathed deeper allowing my roots, like the tree, to go deeper into the earth holding the lake. Slowly, slowly, my thoughts, intentions, and heart found the beauty. And my whisper, my prayer, that like the lake, my seeking would hold the reflection for all.