THE HEALING POWER OF BEAUTY

 THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that last as long as life itself. (Rachel Carson)

September 1 marks the start of the annual Season of Creation. For some (many?), this is more a time to grapple with all the negative news we hear about the environment, nature, climate, etc. than to celebrate our beautiful Creation, give thanks for it, and be inspired by it.
I recognize this very intensely myself. I, too, struggle with these two sides.
Inspired by what Rachel Carson writes above, I now want to think a little deeper, with confidence and joy, about one of those mysteries that intrigue me so much: WHY IS THERE SO MUCH BEAUTY that we humans often never even see and that has been around for millions, even billions of years: in so-called lifeless nature, in the plant world, in the animal world, and among us humans? The entire cosmos is full of it! It is incomprehensible...!


PURE EXTRAVAGANCE

"Why all those lush colors, gossamer wings, silky petals? Why rainbow-colored waterfalls that plunge into deep, winding rivers that disappear into the folds of beautiful mountains? Cool forests with feathery ferns at the foot of towering trees, filled with the cheerful song of birds? Why ‘rustling’ waves of grasslands, full of flowers, chirping crickets, high-flying meadow birds? Deserts lit up by luminous cactus flowers, the call of ravens, the song of coyotes? Why clouds ablaze with the setting sun?" wrote the great nature lover Betty Crawford. 

The easy, rational answer might be: because we have developed our senses and our consciousness to find all this beautiful. But then you might ask: why so incredibly extensive and varied? Couldn't we have developed to find a much more boring world satisfying? Couldn't bees and hummingbirds have evolved to pollinate a planet full of (only) white flowers? Butterflies and birds don't need their beautiful jewel colors to fly or find food, do they? Peacocks and turkeys could have devised quieter ways to attract a mate—or so we think. It is precisely the pure extravagance of it all, the “excessiveness,” that makes it so mysterious. 

BEAUTY AS POWER        
According to cosmologist Brian Swimme, beauty is an aspect of that universal force we call attraction. Beauty as attraction. Yes, we recognize that in our daily lives. Beauty attracts. But isn't beauty actually something much more fundamental? Even in the world we cannot see, there is an incredible amount of beauty. 

According to physicists, it was beauty and harmony that manifested themselves as one of the first forces when the great gravitational pull brought together the newborn atoms of the universe to form the first stars. The stars themselves then felt the gravitational pull on each other as they came together in galaxies, such as our own Milky Way, which we can admire on a clear night. 
Dust drifted between all those stars, gathering to form planets, around which moons sometimes also formed. An unimaginably grand process, summarized here in a few words. And to think that it didn't stop there, but that one of the eight planets orbiting our sun, our Earth, developed into that beautiful ‘blue planet’, full of dynamism and life.

AND THEN THE SUN AND THE EARTH...
A ‘lifelong’ bond between the sun and the earth was created. The sun was there ‘a little’ earlier (about half a billion years!), but then it was able to offer its full light and warmth to that relatively small, young Earth - so now for more than four billion years. After many intermediate steps, that long relationship led to the emergence of life, an incredibly intimate event, you might say: from extremely small, minuscule plants to increasingly larger plants. 

Then came that amazing moment when living beings discovered how to make the chlorophyll molecule (especially in leaf green). This chlorophyll reacts to the light of the sun in a rich resonance, vibrating, as it were, with the different colors of sunlight—without any violence, just very beneficially, just as we can also experience sunlight as very beneficial. By creating this highly complex molecule, plants bound themselves and the entire earth to the sun in an increasingly intimate relationship. Thanks to that chlorophyll, they were able to use the abundant carbon dioxide, together with water, to bring oxygen into the atmosphere and produce energetic sugars for plant growth—allowing increasingly complex and dazzlingly beautiful life to emerge.
 
ATTRACTION IS CREATIVE
These are a few ‘big’ examples of how attraction, or seduction if you will, does not stop somewhere, but continues, not more of the same, clones we would say, but creatively: creating new things. And that continues today. Not only on a large scale (in the universe) but also on a small scale and even on a very small scale.

In that ‘in-between’ where we humans exist (we are not 'big' and we are not 'small') we know very well how beauty, harmony, intimacy, complexity, etc. attract us. We know this, of course, in human relationships and in their fruitfulness: not only in new physical life, small children, however incredibly important, but also in friendship, in caring for each other, in faithful service.

The same is true in so many other forms of creativity, curiosity, research, and that lasting amazement at everything that comes our way, nearby and further away, like in society. Deep within us lies an irresistible creative instinct. As human beings we are spontaneously, from within, focused on beauty, connectedness, harmony, interaction, and cooperation. We are, indeed everything is, as a theologian wrote, blessed from the beginning.

We see this throughout the animal world (to which we humans also belong): many forms of involvement, even intimacy, and also, for example, curiosity, organizing and ordering, creating beauty. Think, for example, of the intimacy between horses and also smaller animals, the beautiful building of nests, the care for newborns, and countless other examples...

WE ARE TRANSPOSED
When you look or listen to all this and think about it, you feel your whole being responding to it. It responds to the experience of beauty, harmony, creativity, radiant life.

This natural process of attraction, which produces forms in great creativity, which grows into beauty and intimacy—or however you try to imagine this wonderful process—has produced an earth, a living world of indescribable beauty. Imagine walking through a field of wildflowers. Or looking at the structure of a shell through a microscope. Or discovering the complex mathematical language that governs the universe. Or, of course, the beauty of a young child or other (young) living being that touches us deeply.
At such moments, indeed, our whole being responds to the power of beauty. Our hearts open. Our energy rises. We feel alive, connected, excited. We are transported, as it were, to another world. We cross a threshold into a realm where worries are put into perspective and the confusions of everyday life subside. Another world that is just as real as the often routine reality of everyday life. Beauty and creativity are just as real, but they do require you to open yourself up to them. It requires you to consciously detach yourself from what is preoccupying you and holding you in its grip at that moment.

EVOLUTION INSPIRES AWE
As mentioned before, if you take the time and peace to allow yourself to be touched by beauty, harmony, or creativity, you will experience how beneficial that is. In light of the many challenges of existence, it gives you reason to love life again. We experience this clearly in our good moments. And what is perhaps even more surprising: beauty has been around for centuries and centuries! That beauty, harmony, and creativity have been around since the very beginning of our universe; you cannot realize that deeply enough.

Perhaps you could say that the cosmos wanted to find a way to “reflect” on all the beauty it had created, and that is why it ultimately evolved into us, thinking, feeling, seeing, desiring, intimately loving human beings. What a beautiful thought and a tribute to the Creator, who has embedded this life-loving capacity in all of creation from the very beginning! This has long been doubted, because the earth has also gone through several major crises (just think of the five major extinctions, the extinction of almost all life), but great scholars, cosmologists, and astronomers today can only conclude, with all the questions still unanswered, that this fundamental focus on (ever-evolving) life must really exist—to their surprise and amazement! 
We, ordinary people, can wholeheartedly agree with that.
 
THAT'S ALL VERY NICE...  
  
But meanwhile, the Amazon rainforest is burning so that we can grow soybeans to feed pigs. Or to make room for cattle farmers to supply beef for fast food hamburgers. Or to drill for oil to satisfy our insatiable hunger for consumer goods... and so on and so forth. The newspapers are full of it.
And what we humans do to each other!

You wonder to yourself:
How, surrounded by so much beauty, harmony, and creativity, have we managed to create a history of so much cruelty, neglect, and indifference? That is the other mystery that many, including myself, struggle with. 
Our soul, our heart, our whole inner being longs for the beauty, harmony, and creativity that we know so well from within. Yet our thoughts and actions are so easily focused on the superficial and the fleeting. We pollute our environment and fail to feed and protect our children. We wage war for land and resources. We lock up families fleeing the danger caused by our policies. We burn the lungs and nutrients of our planet...

STILL OPENING OURSELVES TO BEAUTY?

In light of this destruction, is there still room to reflect on and open ourselves to the value, power, and healing capacity of beauty? In our good moments, we know that we must certainly do so and make room for it, perhaps even a lot of room. That healing effect takes us out of ourselves, brings us back to real, joyful, and inspired living, time and time again. Opening ourselves up to beauty, taking time to enjoy it, gives us the strength to bear the weight of disappointment, sadness, and anger and to focus on recovery. 

Beauty is not a superficial attraction. The ultimate beauty of flowers does not lie in how beautiful they are, i.e. how beautiful we find them. They existed at least 160 million years before we humans came along to enjoy them. Their great power lies in what the universe wanted from them, not in what we want.

They are cosmic beings, forged molecule by molecule from stardust and the raw materials of our earth. Like so many other products of evolution, they allow the soul of the earth to emerge from the ground beneath our feet, as it were—it couldn't be simpler, you might say. They, too, like all other life, are shaped by relationships and for relationships. They are very adept at entering into them: with the soil that nourishes them, with the air they breathe, with the sunlight they convert into food, with the plants and animals around them. And we are only talking about flowers...

In fact, the whole of nature, from the subatomic level to the largest units in our cosmos, is based on relationships, on cooperation, on connection, on dynamics.

RELATIONSHIPS - THAT'S WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT
Relationships characterized by beauty, harmony, and creativity. Profound beauty that goes hand in hand with goodness. These draw our deepest inner selves to them, in bonds of intimacy and love. 
Why are we often so devastated by the news? We are so deeply disappointed because we feel how profound relationships are being broken day after day. That hurts us.
It is true that we owe a great deal to our industrial society, but unfortunately it often leads to connection, harmony, and beauty being abused and even destroyed—which has an impact on our human relationships, on both a small and large scale. Yet, when we take the time and find the peace, we continue to experience that this goes against the positive attraction, harmony, creativity, and beauty that our hearts yearn for. 

The profound and encouraging lesson of beauty, harmony, and creativity lies in the healthy energy they continually generate in us humans. This is not just theory. We experience it when we consciously move toward that which attracts us, connects us, gives us peace, and which we find beautiful. We experience that we change, relax, grow, heal, that new light and joy come into our lives. 

THE HEALING POWER OF BEAUTY and harmony and creativity and ... 
How much I wish you, reader, this experience! Then there is every reason to truly celebrate and experience the Season of Creation, also as a gift!

Finally, before closing this reflection, enjoy these three beautiful fractals: fresh broccoli, an unfolding fern, and a spiraling cactus:















[ A fractal is a geometric shape that exhibits an infinitely complex pattern, in which the same shape or pattern repeats itself at different scales, a property known as self-similarity. Fractals are very common throughout nature. ]


Johan Muijtjens
end of August 2025