What do you consider beautiful? A thought of kindness? An act of charity? Freedom, truth, passion? A gesture, a glance, a movement, a voice? A creation, our creations, all thats ever been and will be? In a world of many minds and many ideas, can any one notion of beauty ever truly be so? Would one suffice, would a multitude be in excess? What is enough, could there ever be too much?
The humanities; art, music, words, expression in any form and medium, the pearls of our existence, rise and fall with the tastes of today but with the dedication of some, persist for all tomorrows. The human experience is forever captured in our creation. Maybe as a tapestry of bayeux of sorts, or the heiroglyphs in the pyramids, I often wonder what will be thought of the kind of life we led during my short time in this body. What will we leave behind? What will we have taken away from our own yesterdays? What creative processes lived on and what destructive cycles were quelled at last?
We are very lucky to live now, in a cycle of civilization that promotes our creative spirit. We can say things and do things out of impulse and not face the overwhelming retribution of those in disagreement. We can create something out of nothing in whatever way we must, and if we choose to have a worry it would be of reward, not of retaliation.
This civilization is an incarnation of those of the past, a great many of which glistened bright and open in golden ages akin to our own, only to fall to darker times and insular minds once more. History has shown us that with the rise of freedom, of expression, of liberation of society, come those who use these same rights to crush the spirit of others. Perhaps they remember the rigid scaffolding that gave rise to the blossoming of the humanities, and so they seek to imprison the bloom once more. But the cycle continues, from the ashes of what was beautiful, beauty rises again.
But when will the cycle end? Can it end? Can we continue on in this way, unchained and harmonious in one sense, and unchecked and discordant in the other. Which will be the movement that persists past the ending of the cycles, liberty or death? Expression is the life-breath of humanity. Our passions, no matter the outlet, can only be stifled for so long before they rise again, or humanity itself meets its' end.
With the book and people burning of the nazi party, the crushing of the renaissance in the Bonfire of the Vanities.. countless beauties have met cruel ends throughout history. We are naive to think that it will not happen again, if it isn't happening already, without each of us proactively doing something to protect our collective humanity. In an environment such as this, a resoundingly free and wonderful society, it seems like for some it is so much easier to criticize without creating. It strikes me with full force the temporality of our existence, our tastes, our notions of beauty. Unless the essence of our creation grows more fluid with time, our every effort to preserve will eventually be eroded. Why with the momentary rise of peace and nonviolence with gandhi came the atrocities of the split of india and pakistan? There must be something we are missing in each of these rises of society that causes us to fall once more. What is the keystone that we are missing in arching our infinite capacity with our limited time?
There are many ways to choose to live to list in their entirety. In a lifetime we may each live in the ways of many before or in many ways never tried. And we may even live one way until the very end. It is to a realm of endless possibility which we are born, and here we persist for our own fleeting eternity. I share with many the feeling that we are standing at the brink, that we have never been so close to securing our own demise with our actions or inactions. Are we going to let all thats good get washed away again, perhaps for the last time? Won't you take the time to reason with your heart. See that there's much more to life than you and I, much brighter light than we can ever behold, more beauty that we can ever hold Whose world are you living for?