Under the Oaks: Summer Should Be Beautiful

But not in the way we've been taught...

Welcome to Under the Oaks, a quiet place to sit and read in the Land of Oaks and Roses.

Marcel Rieder (1862-1925)

I’ve always loved beautiful things. Art, design, flowers, clothes, words, houses, a wooded path, 8pm summer sunlight. It feels so good to be drawn to something for no reason other than it’s beauty. That inner draw is pulling you somewhere different than its pulling me. It’s mysterious, uncontrollable. More persistent than an algorithm. A way for the universe to communicate with us, I think.

Beauty feels good. But it’s easy to misunderstand. We think we can use beauty to make the hard parts of being human go away. We use it to feel full when we’re empty, in control when we’re lost, comfortable when we’re not. A transaction we’ve all tried but never works.

This isn’t to say that any one item/trend/lifestyle is bad. It’s never about the thing itself, which is why you can see something on someone and love it immediately only to see it on someone else a minute later and decide you don’t like it. The thing stayed the same. What changed is the person’s energy. We all feel the difference. We feel wholeness when we see it. Emptiness too. We think we’re seeing something we want to consume, but what we’re actually seeing is something we want to become. And the thing alone will never get you there. You can’t buy someone’s wholeness even if you dress the same or decorate the same or eat the same as them. I think this is part of why we feel so cynical about beauty today. The false idea of it is a big let down. But beauty, in its true form, will never stop reminding you of what it really is.

“I now accept with total confidence that beauty and truth converge—almost as if their mutual attraction is woven into the building blocks of the universe… And if you doubt this, I will simply respond: It would be a strange universe if goodness and truth were not beautiful. I refuse to live in that sort of world. You shouldn’t either.”

Ted Gioia

Something I’ve been working on this summer is getting in contact with that feeling of wholeness before going out to do anything in the world. Or opening social media. Or buying anything. Or writing/posting anything. We all know that feeling! It’s the one you get when your kid says something so funny that you have to stop everything you’re doing and laugh. It feels like the wholeness is running over. Like there’s nothing you need. Touching that feeling for even a few seconds helps me remember what the pull of real beauty feels like, and makes it less likely for me to get unknowingly dragged by the pull of lack.

Beauty is what you love when there’s nothing to gain from loving it. It’s not there to serve us, it is us. It’s that rare night when you catch a gorgeous setting sun and realize that you’re not just seeing something beautiful but that you’re experiencing the beauty in you. It’s an invisible thread between our internal wholeness and this external world we all have to navigate. We feel it when we see it. It’s true, and ancient. It’s yours.

Wishing you a beautiful July. See you next week!

With much love,

Olivia