Today I am wondering about beauty and
The Fragrance of Beauty
Why does beauty exist? And why do not only humans but animals appreciate beauty? Look at the bright colors of many male birds. Apparently female birds often choose the most beautiful and colorful males as their mates. And look at the dances some birds perform as part of the mating ritual. How did these behaviors evolve?
The book I am reading right now (I mentioned it in a blog post last week), Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace by Carl Safina, suggests that animals develop their own cultures. Just as different human families speak different languages, different families of birds create slightly different songs and behaviors than other families. When a bird moves from one area to another area with a different culture, the bird changes its song to match the culture of the birds in its new home.
Macaws are not only alike, male and female, but brilliant. Plumes, colors, patterns, personality—macaws have it all. And what we see—is beautiful.
Being big enough and smart enough to essentially avoid predation, macaws can afford indulging their own tastes for splashy tropical-fruit-punch colors and long-tailed elegance. Their beauty likely results from millennia of mates choosing gorgeous mates. But whatever the origins, it’s stunning to realize that what they deem beautiful—we deem beautiful. Mysteriously, we resonate with what is sexy to them. It’s as if, from so widely shared a subjective sense, a strange objectivity emerges. Beauty is both “arbitrary,” as we’ve said, and yet not wholly in the “eye of the beholder.” The sense of the beautiful is widely a shared sense. It is quite as if beauty has to it a deep universality…
Why do we hear beauty in birds’ singings, when the songs are functional only among birds? Why are the decorations and markings that sexually excite hummingbirds and sunbirds so wondrously beautiful—to us?
— Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace
And then there are the many and varied scents of flowers. I prefer fragrant flowers to those that do not have a detectable fragrance. Though there are flower scents that I don’t like, when I think about flowers, I think of all the sweet fragrances that I find beautiful. It makes sense that pollinators will find flowers beautiful or the scent of flowers beautiful. But humans aren’t pollinators so why do humans find flowers and flower fragrance any more attractive than plant stems or roots? Just think about the many flower fragrances there are. Each species develops its own—roses, lilies, lilacs, iris, peonies, gardenias, jasmine, petunias. Which are your favorites?
Doesn’t it fill you with wonder and reverence just pondering the mysteries of life here on earth?
Spring is turning to summer
The wheel of the seasons turns faster than I would like. Spring has moved from the woodland spring ephemeral wildflowers in bloom and tiny sprouts of green popping out, to crab apples blossoms, tulips and red buds in bloom, and now to a riot of green everywhere, fragrant lilacs in bloom, and baby robins in the nest in front of our house.
This is what the first two baby robins looked like on Saturday just after they hatched. They look so fragile and primitive. It’s hard work emerging from the egg.
We are trying to stay away from the front door of the house or going too near the nest as every time we do the mother robin flies off. Today we have painters at the house painting garage door trim and the house foundation and we’re worrying about how the baby robins will do. Will the mother robin be able to feed them frequently enough or will she be too frightened?
I feel so blessed to be able to watch wild creatures right outside my front door and in our backyard.
On my walks I have been stopping frequently to smell the flowers. There are still some beautiful apple blossoms and lilacs are blooming profusely in our neighborhood. I always wish I could slow down the turning of this season so that I could soak in more of its beauty and wonder.
“What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.
When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.”
― Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
As I respond the the sight and fragrance of beauty all around me I feel great reverence. I seek to experience the same sense of wonder and grace in all the seasons of the year, even dreaded winter here in Minnesota.
“Grace is the permanent climate of divine kindness; the perennial infusion of springtime into the winter of bleakness.”
― Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
Have a beautiful week and soak in all the beauty of the season.
May you walk in beauty.
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