The Beauty is Real

and it might reveal a more connected and meaningful existence

Dec 12, 2023

What makes life meaningful?

…a question that has the power to energize, uplift and bring us closer together. But as we have seen throughout history, also has the power to bring the most extreme levels of darkness and division the world has ever seen.

In my view, nothing is more dangerous than someone claiming to have the answer to this question, but nonetheless, it is one I have been asking for most of my life. My dance with it has kept things interesting, and as I’ve been exploring the world of writing artist statements and applying for different opportunities, I’ve realized how much of an impact it has had on my choices as an artist and a person.

Understanding our human search for meaning has been a fixation of mine since my first existential breakdown in the lunchroom of my high school at age 15. I didn’t understand what was happening to me at the time, but I was suddenly paralyzed by the feeling that most of what was driving mine and others’ behavior was unconscious, selfish and unfulfilling. I found my interactions with others to be devoid of substance and a competition for attention. I realize now that this kind of selfish and performative behavior is pretty standard for even the most enlightened 15 year olds, but at the time, it felt like I was suddenly aware that everyone was wearing a mask of normalcy. I was confused why no one seemed to be concerned about the fact that we had popped into existence upon a floating rock in space. (And this was long before my foray into psychedelics….) Where was the earnest, constant sense of overwhelming awe? Why was everyone playing it so cool?

I couldn’t tell you what sparked this crisis in my little teenage brain, but I felt suddenly incapable of pretending it was normal to exist. Everything was weird and why weren’t we all acting like everything is really weird?? Why are we not having big existential town halls where we all sit around and talk about how weird it is to be here and try to figure out the best thing to do about it?

Turns out I guess that humans have indeed been sitting around talking about these things since the dawn of time, but it just wasn’t the hot topic in my small rural North Carolina town. I eventually calmed down enough to go about my life as a high school theatre kid (if I’m going to be performing all the time, it might as well be on a stage, right?), but my fascination with the search for meaning has been a relentless driving force in my life ever since.

I had been raised Christian, but always left church feeling bored, skeptical, and generally uninspired. I was provided with superficial answers that seemed to placate many of the people around me when it came to the question of existence, but left me feeling even more alone and confused.

In college, I studied buddhism and metaphysics and almost switched my major from theatre to philosophy and religion, but ultimately decided I’d rather play on stage than write papers, so I stuck with theatre. But learning about Buddhism was my first introduction to eastern philosophy, and provided a huge sense of relief that at least there were alternative frameworks from which to address my existential dread. I experimented with psychedelics and started reading the likes of Terence McKenna and Ram Dass and finally felt validated in my unshakeable feeling that there were bigger, more cosmic concerns to worry about than getting a job and finding someone to marry. I had found my people in the psychonauts, philosophers, and spiritual seekers and spent the majority of my twenties throwing big parties in alternative communities and creating avant-garde theatre about dreams and cats and all things weird.

But I did eventually have another breakdown, and this one was a bit more intense.

Because, for all my reading, for all my seeking and philosophizing, I had not transcended the slow, arduous, painful vulnerability of my existence. If anything, all the reading and philosophizing had distracted me from the more challenging work of owning my flaws, taking accountability for my life and behavior, and being fully present and grounded in the daily practice of living with other people. Confronting this reality felt like falling into an endless abyss of self-loathing. I was sure that my existence caused more harm than good, that I was fundamentally unlovable, and that the only beneficial use of my energy was meditating in a cave far away from civilization.

I was stuck in this state for a while, unable to function on any level beyond mere survival, hiding from myself and the world so as to minimize the harm I knew I would inevitably cause. But my family had been planning to take a trip down to Florida to see my grandparents, and I somehow mustered up the fortitude to get in the car for a very long ride with my Dad and both of my siblings. I was barely holding it together, though. My poor, sweet family did not know what to do with me. Despondent would be the word… a state they had not ever seen me in before. I had brought along “The Wisdom of Insecurity” by Alan Watts for the car ride and even though I knew that my spiritual seeking tendencies had been a large part of the problem, this book seemed to be speaking straight to me, the seeker on a quest, so obsessed with the spirituality of the Self that I had forgotten to look out at the world.

“…in practice we are all bewitched by words. We confuse them with the real world, and try to live in the real world as if it were the world of words. As a consequence, we are dismayed and dumbfounded when they do not fit. The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security….
…If you ask me to show you God, I will point to the sun, or a tree, or a worm. But if you say, "You mean, then, that God is the sun, the tree, the worm, and all other things?"--I shall have to say that you have missed the point entirely.”

I was confounded how a book full of words was speaking directly to the problem with my obsession with words, but it was creating a sensation inside me that had the letters glowing and dancing on the page. How was he reading me for filth when he had been dead since 1973?

”So long as there is the motive to become something, so long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment, there can be no freedom. Virtue will be pursued for exactly the same reason as vice, and good and evil will alternate as the opposite poles of a single circle.

Of course it sounds as if it were the most abject fatalism to have to admit that I am what I am, and that no escape or division is possible. It seems that if I am afraid, then I am "stuck" with fear. But in fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it. On the other hand, when I do not try to get away I discover that there is nothing "stuck" or fixed about the reality of the moment. When I am aware of this feeling without naming it, without calling it "fear," "bad," "negative," etc., it changes instantly into something else, and life moves freely ahead.

Love is the organizing and unifying principle which makes the world a universe and the disintegrated mass a community. It is the very essence and character of mind, and becomes manifest in action when the mind is whole.”

I looked up from the book and it felt like I could see again for the first time in years. I was the ouroboros, finally taking a break from chomping on its own ass. And just in time, too, because we had a hotel room on the beach and if there’s one thing about me, it’s that the ocean will always bring me back to life.

“Light in the Shallows” Greece, October 2023

It may seem trite that a single book could pull me up from the depths of despair like that, but it wasn’t just the book. That’s the whole point…. I used to recommend the book to people, but I don’t anymore because the whole point of the book is that the book is not the point. It was the ability of those words to help suspend my desire to be “better” just long enough to turn my full attention to the world outside my thinking mind… to let the beauty in.

I could allow my flaws and darkness to exist and still enjoy my life when it wasn’t about “me” anymore. It was about the adorable raccoons in the trash bins at the gas station. It was about my precious Opa who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s telling his famous stories a few extra times while he played us in poker and blackjack. It was about the sunlight dancing on the ocean surface while my sister played with her hoop in the sand beside me. My self-reflection had been a hall of mirrors blinding me from seeing beauty, and I had finally taken the blinders off.

It’s been quite a few years since that breakdown. I will be integrating its lessons for the rest of my life, but as my story brings us to the present moment, I share with you the ideas that have emerged in me since then, giving me the greatest calm and sense of equilibrium among the storms and throes of existence :

Beauty is potent medicine. It is not superficial. It is not superfluous. It is vital, and finding it, creating it, and bearing witness to it is a practice that leads to deeper connection and a more meaningful life.

Therefore, the role of the artist is to create and highlight beauty such that it uplifts the mind and empowers others to observe more beauty in their present moment in spacetime.

It is not “Look what I made.” It is “Look what we are. Look how beautiful and strange we are.”

The word beauty has been co-opted (as most things have in our capitalist hellscape) by an industry that seeks to dictate certain standards of appearance in order to sell products that claim to assist us in meeting said standards. These products have nothing to do with beauty. The connotation of beauty as a standard of attractiveness has done immeasurable harm to our relationship with the concept. It is apparent in the lack of imagination and creativity in our schools, current architecture, design and relationship with our natural environment as something to be exploited that artistic expression, appreciation and cultivation of beauty is culturally viewed as unnecessary, superficial and not inherently valuable. (I am, of course, speaking from my cultural experience as a born and raised US citizen. I understand that this is not true of all cultures, and that many have revered the cultivation of beauty as a spiritual practice, such as Balinese, Navajo, Andean and I’m sure many others.) As a result, we are largely uninspired, lacking meaning and craving a deeper connection to each other and the world.

Beauty is a direct path to that deeper connection and meaning. Noticing it opens us to a sense of childlike wonder and awe. It dissolves the boundaries between what we perceive to be the “self'“ and the world around us, similar to a psychedelic experience, but much more gentle and accessible. It allows love to arise naturally for other people as we witness them more honestly and fully, no longer projecting our own insecurity onto them while stuck in a blinding hall of mirrors. It is impossible to let beauty all the way in and not expand. There is so much of it everywhere. It is impossible to see a person for who they truly are and not feel love. It allows us to appreciate those aspects of life that we would otherwise ignore, resist or find too painful to look at. When we see without projection, there is beauty there too.

Take it from a lifelong seeker who has been forever plagued by the question, “what makes life meaningful?”… beauty dissolves the boundary between the question and the answer and the two merge into one.