• November 10, 2023
• by Miriam
• Retreats

Wholeness: the Secret Ingredient of Beauty

The longings within human experience are the yearnings for goodness, beauty, and unity within every being. These longings point us to what is most real, beautiful and good. We spend a lot of time and emotional energy trying to assuage our longings without ever really feeling them. Beauty wraps unity, truth and goodness into one brilliant package of completion and perfect harmony. Wholeness is the secret ingredient of beauty. All beings born from the Divine womb are whole regardless of external realities.

“I will believe the truth about myself, no matter how beautiful it is.”

Macrina Wiederkehr

However, beauty is sometimes submerged in fear and domination. Fear and violence fragment all living beings. Fear’s goal is to wrap us in a cloak that strangles us, blinds us, and renders us totally less than who we really are. But fear is a bully whose undoing is love. When we experience beauty, for a moment we are thrust straight into the heart of love. Our soul’s music sings with the Divine symphony all around us, and for that moment we do believe the truth about ourselves. Beauty catapults us past our fear. If we dare to hear the Echo of Beauty in our souls and allow the river of Divine Love to heal our broken places, we will claim our own beauty, releasing our True Selves to walk a path of peace in the world, where fear now reigns.

I remember sitting on a rotting, cedar log bench, overlooking the Malewa River which flows from its source in the Aberdare mountains to Lake Naivasha in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. An exquisite, orange aloe flower bloomed in front of us and I stared at it. “Now that is beautiful,” I thought. A sunbird alighted on its petals and expertly injected its beak, sucking out the pure life-giving nectar. He is beautiful too, I thought. “I will believe the truth about myself, no matter how beautiful it is.” The gut wrenching words floated through my heart. The truth about me? As beautiful as that aloe flower? As exquisite as the sunbird? As I sat there in the equatorial sunlight at noon intoning this mantra,this unbelievable hope, I knew that the aloe and sunbird are most beautiful in full sun, all their radiant colors shimmering and reflecting in the bright noontime exposure. The same might be true about me, and if me, than you too.

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Miriam

Miriam spent her childhood in Central and Eastern Africa, embracing a need to live close to nature and profound respect for the wisdom of the divine feminine. Combining her training in Intercultural Communication, Sustainable Development, Nonprofit Leadership and Spiritual Direction, she has served in a variety of community development programs over the last 25 years across Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and Kenya. Since 2010 she has served as Founding Director of Eden Thriving, a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating thriving lives and flourishing landscapes by addressing the environmental roots of poverty. She makes her permanent home at Echoes of Eden along the banks of the Malewa River in Naivasha, Kenya.