Beauty

Don’t fall for pretty. Or cute. Or darling. They are all just easy pleasantries.

Instead go for beauty. For ages, philosophers have argued over the notion of beauty, and artists have struggled to create it.

Beauty is a soup of nature, spirit, form, depth, wholeness, transcendence and the sublime. There’s nothing pretty about it.

Sexting

I recently became aware of two sexting incidents at two different schools, at least one involving 14-year-olds. These young people are now potentially guilty of felonies; and who knows what family, social, criminal and long term consequences will follow. We hear about these things on the news and respond, horrified and judgmental.

At the same time, we are sadly familiar with the kinds of awful choices adolescents and their underdeveloped brains can make. At this age they need help, support and solid mentoring in their lives. But what does our culture offer?

It offers highly sexualized media, where sex is easy with no real consequences. It offers sexually infused marketing at all levels. It offers them mobility, freedom, money and indirect power with few constraints. If offers them a culture in which high percentages of parents, both men and women, have affairs. Sex is everywhere.

But there are no rituals for manhood and womanhood, or even places to have healthy discussions about this. There are few programs that educate about healthy sexual behavior. We leave it to the family, and hope.

So we don’t need to be horrified at the young people. We need to turn around and be horrified at ourselves.

Happy childhood

We spend incredible amounts of time, money and resources on the problems of alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual abuse, domestic abuse, depression, gun violence, homelessness and other social issues.

To me, the one thing that could cause a turn around on all these issues at once is to guarantee every child a happy childhood. Of course, this would not be easy by any means and may cost more than we currently spend on social problems. But in the process of trying, we would produce more productive citizens and greater cultural stability.

What’s wrong with a goal like this, pie-in-the-sky as it might be? At least we would openly commit to caring about all our children—something we obviously don’t do now.

Search for art

Search for art that won’t leave you alone.

Search for art that gives you what you need not what you want.

Search for art that pushes beyond itself.

Search for art that is unsettling but truthful.

Search for art that won’t get stale.

What to believe

The Christian God gives me essentially two choices, heaven and hell. This walls up good and evil in their separate fortresses, and makes fear and anxiety the drivers of life choices. I struggle through a life of oppositions.

If reincarnation is the way of things, that might be an interesting journey—a raven, a cockroach, a mushroom--since modern science has shown us that all life forms exist at a nexus in a complex and  wonderful web.

In the material world, eternity may not be there for me. But I know my atoms and molecules will reassemble with others (a micro level love thy neighbor) according to the unpredictable thrust of evolution. As long as there are bangs and whimpers in the unfolding of the universe, part of me will be there.

Maybe at some point I’ll conclude that it would take an astounding entity—let’s call Him/HerGod--to deliver a universe so complex, so mysterious and so beautiful

Strangeness

Many people are uncomfortable with strangeness in things that may surround them. Yet they are often attracted to strangeness in their entertainment choices. Why this seeming contradiction?

People who live a life of creativity and imagination—in the arts and sciences—know that at the end of any adventure of discovery, there is strangeness—a black hole, an unexpected creature living deep in the sea, art that explodes reality, human behavior. For them, strangeness is what’s expected and what is the actual reward.

Though this strangeness of the new and different makes folks uneasy, it lifts one more veil of misunderstanding, expands human potential and makes the world seem comfortably true again.

So enjoy being genuinely strange. Just don’t get to weird.