We live on a beautiful planet whose beauty is designed to fill out hearts with ecstasy. This beauty belongs to the goddess Sophia who splashed her paints and colors across land and sea to create a divine masterpiece. It is an ever-flowing gift for us to experience the ecstatic beauty of the Earth’s art in every moment as a source of divine inspiration.
Sophia’s painting is a magical 3D world of earth art amidst lush forests and valleys, refreshing rivers and seas, majestic mountains and rolling hills, deep canyons and endless plains. To all this wonder she added the flora and fauna of her imaginings, and in which we have all the healing medicine we need, including ecstatic beauty.
The prophet, Kahlil Gibran, stated that “beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.”
Beauty is the ecstasy of our hearts enflamed and our souls enchanted by a carpet of sunlit lavender wildflowers along the forest trail, a grand rainbow painted in the sky after the rain and a luminous full moon rising over the turquoise sea. We do not need beauty for it is carved into our hearts and we recognize it with the eyes of our souls. Beauty has an eternal home within us. When the Earth reveals the beauty of her art, the images never leave us and the song it sings plays forever. In the mirror of beauty we see the reflection of our own internal beauty with which to create a more beautiful world.
When we no longer respond to the ecstatic beauty of the Earth’s art, we betray beauty. We close the door to the unexpected guest of beauty who brings the fleeting gift of ecstasy. We need ecstasy, for it is the divine spark that ignites beauty and sets our souls and hearts on fire. We underestimate the power of beauty, for it to speak to us, touch us deeply and move us closer to the truth of divine goodness in which we experience the mystery of ecstasy. We underestimate the power of mystery in which moments of ecstatic beauty capture us, forever. But beauty like freedom must be defended and preserved. A world without beauty is a world without freedom, and our freedom is a beautiful thing.
Everywhere on this blue star, there is a beautiful painting for which the divine planetary Mother appears to be the artist. I am quite certain that the creator god has a female counterpart, a goddess, for in all the tender and fragrant beauty I sense a woman’s hand. Nature’s beauty provides a boundless source of inspiration for artists, who understand that the gift of the imagination must accompany reasoning faculties in order to witness the revelation of ecstatic beauty. The Earth’s art calls us to create paintings and sculptures, music and dance, poetry and songs, myths and stories, photographs and films, architecture and design, homes and gardens. Without the reflection of beauty to inspire us, the arts and humanities would cease to exist.
The Earth’s art overflows with infinite shapes, textures, lines, dimensions, structures, shades of colors, ever-changing light, materials, elements, resources and thousands of trees, plants, flowers and animals that share this land, sea and sky with us. The ecstatic beauty of the Earth is a living art that we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch for a full sentient encounter with a divine, intelligent spirit as the source of all creation.
The bliss of beauty is the revelation of our own capacity to create beauty. When we fail to behold beauty as an ecstatic unveiling, we disregard the material world as a spiritual immersion. This erroneous perception leads to the exploitation of planetary resources, the toxic poisoning of our soils and air and filling our oceans with plastic waste. We must never threaten beauty with destruction, for in doing so, we destroy the spiritual spark of the divine that pervades all life and all art. We must walk the forest trail with ecstatic expectations for beauty to unveil her divine face amidst the momentary blooms of the wildflowers.
