Microdosing Beauty
A Daily Practice for the Creative Heart
“Spring is coming” —I texted a friend in the dead of winter and the message back echoed— “Spring is coming.” What else was there to say in late January when creative energy is as short as the day. When hibernation feels more like a coffin of creative paralysis. When the daily news shovels heap after heap of inhumanity and we are buried alive by existential grief.
Yet somehow, even when the body is sedentary and the soul is immobile, the creative heart keeps beating. The creative heart has two roles, really. The first is to create. The second is to sustain the soul during times of dis-ease. It takes a stubborn vigilance that is nothing short of an involuntary miracle in the midst of chaos to do both.
But the creative heart is not naturally healthy--it needs care and nourishment, like its physical counterpart, to serve our souls without pause. It is always working, particularly when we are not conscious, to alchemize experience into meaning. This kind of alchemy requires a strong immune system, and if the creative heart isn’t healthy, it will suffer more than it will create.
The thriving artist and the creative heart must have a relationship of reciprocity. The heart works to sustain the imagination and, in turn, the artist must tend to its health by nourishing it with beauty. This is often the rationale for vacations, nature hikes, and even spiritual retreats--to leave the familiarity of our mundane life and allow a new setting to recalibrate our creative perspective. And it works, for a time. But while these occasional excursions can give a much needed creative adrenaline boost, they can also be a kind of existential dissociation that results in relapse when a return to reality checks the balance.
The secret to maintaining a healthy creative heart isn’t in the sporadic beauty of the big getaway--it’s in discovering daily doses of beauty that exist in the familiar setting of our ordinary lives. The kind of beauty often hidden by our attention to distractions of seemingly urgent minutia--household chores, family squabbles, workplace dynamics. These same mundane spaces hide opportunities to access the beautiful. There is beauty in the sliver of late afternoon light on the unvacuumed corner of the house. There is beauty in giving grace rather than assigning blame to a loved one. There is beauty in finding healthy detachment from a collegial conflict.
The creative heart, like any sentient being, craves these daily intentional observations of hidden beauty. If it feeds only on the daily horror of headlines, it will still beat, but in a state of dis-ease of despair. If it feeds only on escapism of technology, it can lapse into spiritual lethargy. Microdosing beauty gives us the strength to carry the paradox of life-- in all its horror and beauty--in each hand.
When we recognize the beautiful everyday, we discover it can be found everywhere regardless of circumstance or setting. Not in the escapist beauty of a vacation, but in the ordinary beauty of the everyday. Yes, it is in the spectacle of a sunrise, the awe of a starry night, the profound sound of a thunderstorm. But beauty can also be found in the silence before a meal, remembering to say goodbye before driving to work, the smell of washed laundry, the movement of a spider creating a web in the ceiling corner, the returned smile of a stranger. These daily microdoses of beauty strengthen the immune system of the creative heart to bear grief and resist despair.
When we begin to practice the art of microdosing beauty, we begin to expand our definition of what is truly beautiful. Beauty is not always attractive. In fact, it is often unseemly. Beauty is anything that can bring us closer to truth and remind us of grace. It activates our compassion and calibrates our ego. It keeps us humble. It holds us in a place of deep love in the middle of external chaos and internal grief.
Microdose a bit of beauty every day--it can be found everywhere. (Sometimes it even appears randomly in literal shapes of leaves, food, clouds!) Treat it as a required dietary supplement. To stave off despair and sustain hope in a world drunk on chaos, we must supply the heart with the only antidote accessible to every creative heart: the recognition of beauty in ordinary everyday life. Finding beauty in the daily rhythm of life is a way of inoculating the imagination of our heart against the virus of despair.
Feed the heart a bit of beauty each day.
Find it where you can.
Spring is here.
And so, heart, keep beating.
This is food for my thoughts, sustenance for my soul, the photos beauty for my eyes, (of my body and my heart). Thank you friend, for sharing this beautiful exhortation and inspiration to see beauty in the everyday.
Agree with you completely! It's what is saving my life daily!