To show the difference between a life lived inflected with beauty and one without, I am going to relate a story that came from a friend of mine.  He lives in the Yukon Territory, a vast and remote region of the Canadian Arctic.

“Kate, you won’t believe this,” he began, “but it really happened.  I was driving along a highway just last week and I could see in the distance something that looked like a curtain.  It looked like we were driving towards a curtain.  I couldn’t quite make it out but as we got closer I realized it was a curtain of snow.  We were going to drive into a curtain of snow!  It was amazing.  I found myself getting more and more excited the closer we got to it until we were in it.  We were in a curtain of snow!  And, do you know that when we were in it I could see every single snowflake as a separate thing?  Each one looked like a diamond.  We were driving in diamonds!  It was beautiful.”

As he told me this story, he became increasingly animated and I found myself feeling almost as joyful listening to it as he was in the telling of it.

Then he said something else.  “You know,” he continued, “my friend, driving with me in the same car at the same time didn’t see it.  She said, ‘I don’t want to see any more snow.’  She didn’t see the curtain and she didn’t see the diamonds.”
On the one hand, you have a man who is completely immersed in the experience of “a curtain of snow”.  On the other hand, you have a person who can’t see the curtain for the snow.  That is the point.  When one is having an experience of beauty, one is ‘in’ the experience.  It is an experience of depth.

Let’s look more carefully at the experience.  What was happening to my friend?  First, he was fully in the present.  He was experiencing nothing outside of the “curtain”.  Second, he was fully alert.  Third, there was no consciousness of time.  Fourth, there was no judgment taking place.  And finally, he had entered a state of awe and wonder.  My friend had connected with his spirit.  His friend had connected with her mind.

His friend took all her past experience and feelings about snow and applied them to what she was seeing.  Her judgments and evaluations determined what she would perceive.  She was coming from the past rather than the present.  Being in the moment was not a possibility for her because she had mentally conditioned the experience.  Thus she had no access to spirit.

You see, entering into beauty is an action, a doing.  We have to choose it to go there.  We have to be fully awake to receive it.  It is always a present experience.  Equally, living in the mind is also a choice.  What is interesting about these choices is that most of the time we are unconscious about them.  Most of the time, we do not realize we are choosing to experience what we experience.

Somehow, we have come to believe that what we experience is happening to us, as if an outside force made us experience life.  To me this is giving away our personal power to randomness.  Life is a choice and a natural one at that.