BEAUTY’S LIGHT COMES UP SLOWLY AND SHYLY ALONG THE EDGES of limitation, confusion, anxiety and helplessness. In such a terrain one would expect anger, resentment, bitterness or destructive negativity. Yet a spirit and atmosphere of graciousness often emerges when the human heart reaches into its own nobility and allows the destructive reaction to disappointment and hurt to open into something more healing and creative. Regardless of outer circumstances and even inner turbulence, we always have the freedom to choose differently. This is a difficult freedom. In many instances, it may be beyond our reach. However, the freedom to choose graciousness is a freedom no-one can take from us. We will always dwell on the frontier of our own limitations and weakness. Each of us is deeply flawed somewhere. We are made of clay and our clay is haunted by gravity. Frequently the flaw can be a point of pure negativity and destructiveness. When the flaw is that severe, it needs to be decisively engaged. Nevertheless, life can take a wonderfully creative turning when we choose to integrate the flaw. It need no longer be a force that diminishes or damages. We can discover the freedom every so often of abandoning the speed and stress of the linear route. The flaw will take us down boreens and pathways we would otherwise never have travelled. We begin to discover new landscapes. Although the journey becomes slow and frequently arduous, through the fractured lens of more vulnerable vision we learn to see neglected corners of the heart that have long awaited the affections of our eyes. We come to remember again that we were not sent here for worldly achievement alone. We find that we are being gently rescued from the illusion of progress, and fragile dimensions of the exiled soul begin to return. In a similar vein Rilke wrote: ‘Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows; by being defeated decisively by constantly greater things.’
Howard Rheingold has written of how, in Japanese culture, the presence of the flaw intensifies the depth of an object’s beauty. The crack in a vase might be prized as a beautiful signature-moment in which the spirit of the emerging object and the humane heartfulness of the artist criss-crossed. The presence of the flaw personalizes and deepens the beauty and character of a thing. The Japanese have a special word to describe this: ‘wabi’. Indeed, this personalization of time as beauty also finds expression in the word ‘shibui’, the beauty of ageing. Rather than being a fall away from beauty, ageing can be the revelation of beauty, the time when the inherent radiance becomes visible.
The shape of each soul is different. An individual is a carefully fashioned, unique world. The shape of the flaw that each person carries is also different. The flaw is the special shape of personal limitation; angled at a unique awkwardness to the world, it makes our difficulty and challenge in the world different from that of others. When we stop seeing the flaw as a disappointment and exception to an otherwise laudable life, we begin to glimpse the awkward light and hidden wisdom that the flaw holds. As we look deeper, we begin to realize that the flaw might be the first window into a world of difference that we rarely notice. Maud Gonne was an animating force in Yeats’s inspiration; in his poem ‘Broken Dreams’, he writes:
You are more beautiful than any one,
And yet your body had a flaw:
Your small hands were not beautiful . . .
Leave unchanged
The hands that I have kissed,
For old sake’s sake.
T
HE
M
IRROR IN THE
U
NKNOWN
Whoever cannot seek
the unforeseen sees nothing,
for the known way
is an impasse.
HERACLITUS
