“Thousands of channels there are through which the beauty of your soul may sail even unto our thoughts. Above all is there the wonderful, central channel of love.”
― Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) – Playwright, poet and essayist born in Ghent, Belgium and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. I’m new to the author but reading this short work and also a few biographical details of how Maurice Maeterlinck loved life, dedicating many hours to careful observations out in nature - flowers, insects, the sky, the stars - for me, above all else, Maurice Maeterlinck is a mystic. And I have found the only way to effectively read a mystic is to meditate on their words slowly and carefully, discovering links between what is being expressed and the depths of one's own interior life. Reading and rereading The Inner Beauty, here are the four lines in particular that really resonated. I am moved to share my own experiences and reflections.

“Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily.” –-------------- Our spiritual depth, our spirit, is an inner dimension we feel more than see. But curiously, our soul yearns for those sight and sounds that expand us well beyond the range of words or concepts. There's the story of a prisoner locked away in a dingy cell and what kept his spirits up was the opportunity to behold a flower, just one flower, when he would take his afternoon exercise in the courtyard. Likewise, I recall riding the train to work one morning to a job I found both suffocating and degrading, when I happened upon a beautiful passage in Calvino about the flight of birds. I held that passage close to my heart for days.

As a young man, I had the good fortune to discover during yoga class, the beauty of breath, its fourfold movement: in-breath, the moment of stillness at the base, out-breath, the moment of stillness at the top. The more I became aware of the act of breathing, the more I became a connoisseur of the breath, feeling the full gamut of sensations, progressively more attuned to the subtlety of the entire process. I then moved on from breath awareness to breath control through the many varieties of pranayama techniques, such that for many years now, the breath has taken on an inner beauty that is nothing less than magnificent.

"Beauty is the only element wherewith the soul is organically connected, and it has no other standard of judgment. This is brought home to us at every moment of our life, and is no less evident to the man by whom beauty may more than once have been denied than to him who is ever seeking it in his heart." ----------------------- I can personally attest to the weighty truth articulated here. I recall a time in my life as a teenager, when my soul and its sensitivity to beauty went into deep hibernation. Although I was enveloped by ugliness - coarse, crude and nasty in the extreme - I failed to see or sense all the ugliness. Then one muggy afternoon, age eighteen, sitting in a locker room, waiting to take the field with the other players on the football team, forced to listen to a coach’s ravings, it happened: like receiving a smack by a Zen master’s rōshi stick, as if the ocean wave of my own inner beauty opened my eyes and heart and swept every grimy inch of the foul ugliness away, I awakened. When the other players ran out to take the field, I remained seated. Then, calmly walking over to the equipment room, I turned in my uniform and pads.

The next morning, perfect timing - I attended a class in the humanities where the professor spoke about the beauty of classical music and played a piano sonata by Frédéric Chopin. Ah, how refreshing. how uplifting and how absolutely exhilarating. Such beauty, I reflected, is what I am at my very center, a beauty that is my authentic nature. I never forgot my awakening; I vowed never again to fall into such a deadening slumber. In a real sense, my adult years have been dedicated to maintaining a connection to my own inner light and inner beauty.

"All the doors are unlocked, we have but to push them open, and the palace is full of manacled queens." ---------------------- Similar to John O’Donohue, Maurice Maeterlinck is urging us to "beautify our gaze" since our experiencing beauty out in nature, in other people, in our many encounters on life’s path, is the unfolding of an inner transformation not a change of scenery. This is one prime reason, if I may say so, I attempt to focus on the inspiring and enriching features and qualities of the books and art I review. Considering all the many great authors and artists who have dedicated their lives to their respective mode of expression, I place the burden on myself as reader to open as much as possible in order to uncover literary and artistic gold and behold the beauty and splendor.

“We must cultivate silence among ourselves, for it is then only that for one instant the eternal flowers unfold their petals, the mysterious flowers whose form and colour are ever changing in harmony with the soul that is by their side.” ---------- Over the past years, each time I’ve gone into silent retreat, sometimes a short as one day or as long as two weeks, dedicating my time to meditation and a quiet moving about, I have always emerged refreshed an rejuvenated. Frank, my dear lifelong friend, spent eighteen years in silence as a Trappist monk. Although many years removed from the monastery, anyone who comes in contact with Frank senses the presence of silence in Frank’s every word and gesture. This to say, when we cultivate silence in our own lives, as Maurice Maeterlinck observes, our soul is brought into harmony with nature and the cosmos. What a gift. But in our modern world, it is up to us to make the effort.

An especial gesture of thanks to my good friend Jean-Paul Werner Walshaw-Sauter from Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland for bringing the essays of Maurice Maeterlinck to my attention.

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