What is Beauty?

It was very early this morning when I posted the drawings below.  I spent all day writing and attending meetings with no time to even write a blog. To give my mind a vacation I decided to draw till I fell asleep. Of course drawing didn't make me sleepy but stimulated me till I was exhausted.  I posted the pictures directly from my iPad while sitting in bed, which is very cool.  From my canvas to the Ethernet with the touch of the screen, and never got out of the sack. Eat your heart out Michael Angelo. 

However, the narrative that went with each picture is missing.  Don't know how that happened, but here is what I think I remember writing this morning.  I'm sure the original inspired thought was clearer and better said.

I was wondering why we label things in the world the way we do.  Take for example a yellow rose and a dandelion.  They are both flowers are the same colors, green and yellow, and both have exactly the same function in the cycle of nature. But the rose is something we plant, cultivate and admire as beautiful. Yet we chop up, poison, discourage and despise the Dandelion as an unattractive weed. Who decided that one flower was a weed and the other a symbol of beauty? It was human beings and not Divine Intelligence.

When I was a kid my Grandmother had a flower garden. She loved roses and took special care to cultivate the prettiest of them all.  My brother and I were reluctantly drafted into the service of "weeding the roses".  There was a week or two in the spring each year when we pulled up dandelions by the bucket full from the rose bed.  It didn't seem to make sense to me that we were pulling up flowers that were thriving in spite of all odds in a flower bed.  And we were doing it to protect a flower that did not naturally thrive in the hot Texas summer and needed to be pampered.  I thought how beautiful a bed of yellow dandelions would be, and they would not require the indentured services of grand kids to protect them each spring.  

The philosopher Joel Goldsmith says that all the worlds problems can be summed up in the erroneous believe in two powers, good and evil, or in this case ugly and beautiful.  He believes that a human judgement of good is no better than a human judgement of bad, both divide the unity of the one.  He points to the allegory of the Garden of Eden when the forbidden tree was of the "knowledge of good and evil".  The forbidden tree was the knowledge of GOOD and evil making the knowledge of good no better than the knowledge of evil. He teaches the absolute unity of divine neutrality, life just is, not "is good" or " is evil".  Shakespeare said, "Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Poets, philosophers and artists sometimes come to the same conclusion when examining life.

As you were,

Jay