Tag Archives: beauty

Dwell on the Beauty

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Take at least a few moments today to dwell on the beauty of life. It’s all around us, all the time, but we are often too overcome with our personal daily work and problems or the ugliness in the news to notice it.

“Take time to smell the flowers” is such a well-known phrase, I suppose it may be almost cliche. However, how many of us actually live it? Intentionally taking notice of life’s beauty is a regular habit we would all benefit from cultivating.

Life is a precious gift. When we notice the beauty and feel gratitude for it, we are essentially saying thank you for that gift. Gratitude is a great amplifier. That which we focus on expands and ripples outward.

Not only do we give ourselves a much needed healing elixir, but we raise our vibration and people around us feel it. Just one more seemingly small way (but it’s huge!) that we can heal the world around us.

Inspirational Quotes:

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.” ~ T.S. Eliot

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.” ~ Saul Bellow

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.” ~ Toni Morrison

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” ~ Rumi

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.” ~ Leo Tolstoy

“You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.” ~ Roman Payne

"Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running from them." Marcus Aurelius

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Dwell on the Beauty | Friendly comments welcome | Photos courtesy Free Nature Stock, Pexels and Leohoho, Pixabay

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It’s Only Skin-Deep

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Are you aware of deeper positive character attributes we automatically apply to an attractive face?

Here’s a great Psychology Today article on beauty and its effect on our psyche: The Surprising Power of a Beautiful Face. A short quote: “[what psychologists call] the halo effect causes one trait (e.g., beauty) to drastically color your perception of all other traits. If you think someone is beautiful, you are also likely to assume they’re smart, ambitious, interesting, etc. We’ve all made these assumptions before, for good or ill.”

We are hard-wired to judge based on appearances

The assumptions we make are evidently hard-wired labels in our brains. So we can be forgiven – at least a little bit. As an interesting exercise, the next time you see a beautiful or handsome face, observe your thought process. Do you quickly assume the person is also intelligent, educated, polite, nice, etc? Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty and love, is laughing in her heaven. She knows, beauty has exerted power for eons.

Beauty is a big subject, with many facets (faces?) to be explored. For example, historically physically attractive politicians in public office seem to be more easily trusted by the population. Particularly in these cases, it behooves us to look deeper. These are people who are steering public policies and our future.

Inspirational Quote:

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” ~ Leo Tolstoy

© Susan L Hart 2021 |  Friendly comments welcome | Photo courtesy 1643606, Pixabay

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Free Your Love

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Infinite love already exists in everything that is alive, including you and me. Our love lessons are about removing the obstacles to love. They teach us out how to access, express, and live it. That is, if we choose to learn.

This can feel difficult in a world that is expressing so much dissension and “un-love”. But each of us is a potential key to healing it.

Fear, anger, prejudice… we employ a myriad of padlocks to hold our love hostage. Every experience around love is an opportunity for self-examination. Our souls desire to learn how to love better.

Consider that perhaps the high tension in the world right now is a challenge to each of us to work on unlocking our own love. Together, we can collectively unleash a world of love that has never been seen before.

Inspirational Quotes:

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
― Mother Teresa

“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
― Mother Teresa

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

© Susan L Hart 2020 |  Friendly comments welcome.

Photos courtesy congerdesignm and zanna-76, Pexels

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Feel Your Essence

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Feeling tired and just a little life torn on this Monday morning? The drama that surrounds us 24/7 is a complicated, human-made matrix that someone has decided to inflict on our souls.

We are complicit. We agree to it! We can overcome this, but we must turn to what is simple and real to find ourselves. We cannot hear our own truth, that wise voice inside, when we are distracted by all that anger, noise, and confusion. Time to take a break:

Walk into this beautiful scene, just for a moment.
Feel the warm sun drenching your body.
Breathe deeply the sweet smell of green on the soft breeze.
Hear the gently trickling, soothing water.
Relax your muscles, and your mind. Go to that place in yourself, that soul center that is wild, free, and unencumbered by the constraints of this 3-dimensional world.
Remember the essence of you…

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Inspirational Quote:

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature, the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” ~ Rachel Carson

“Not just beautiful, though – the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.” ~ Haruki Murakami

“and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.” ~ Ruskin Bond

© Susan L Hart 2020 |  Friendly comments welcome | Photos courtesy Otodex and Free-Photos, Pexels

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Sunflower Luv

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A lighthearted nature post for your Sunday. Sunflowers are my fave flower. Being a sun sign myself, how can I possibly resist them?

Sunflowers are blossoms rolled in sunshine. For many years they’ve been an important part of my garden repertoire. If there is a mixed cut flower bouquet with a sunflower taking center stage, there is no other one for me.

There is probably a bit of ego (ya think?) going on with sunflowers. Here’s a flower that imitates the SUN. They grow BIG, they make up whole golden, gloriously eye-catching fields. In short, they WILL NOT be ignored.

If you are sunflower lover too, do not despair. A passion for sunflowers is a fortunately not fatal attraction. But, here’s fair warning. If you delude yourself that your sunflowers are impatiently awaiting your arrival in the garden, think again. They have only one thing on their minds, which is, “Where’s Mr. Sun now?” The sun is their lover. Any tiny part you play in their world pales in comparison.

The behavior of sunflowers turning to the sun is called heliotropism. They have a 24-hour tracking system that follows the sun everywhere. They’ve even been known to wait in the field at night with their faces turned to the east, awaiting the sunrise.

Now that’s adulation!

More here: What Is It Called When Sunflowers Turn & Face the Sun?

“My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – equal seekers of sweetness. ~ Mary Oliver

“A sunflower field is like a sky with a thousand suns.” ~ Corina Abdulahm-Negura

“Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?” ~ Allen Ginsberg

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© Susan L Hart 2020 |  Friendly comments welcome.

Photos courtesy Mammiya, LightinDarkness, JillWellington, wifeypoo, enriquelopesgarre, Pixabay