The Creative Principle

April was the month of flowers at our house in San Rafael. I lay in the lozenge of light the afternoon sun made on the carpet at that time of year, absorbing the heat. With books, of course, and my journal. The sliding glass patio door was open, though the screen was not, allowing in all the smells of the sap-driven spring growth and the fecund soil. The birds were busy too. A pair of rock doves had nested precariously in the eaves above our front door, rising when we went out with an anxious whir of wings.

The most spectacular blooms that year were the cerise faces of the cistus, which had recently replaced the potato flower tree. The Arizona rose, with its dinner plate-size pink roses, was at its best, though after many years it was a little less showy. There were a few impossibly deep purple bearded iris, given to me as roots by Kim and planted just outside the patio door, as well as a new French lace rose Emiko provided. I watched for each ivory bud to turn a delicate apricot color as it grew. Things were constantly changing in our walled garden room.

We had put more energy and money into that outdoor room than into the whole rest of the house! The heavy bluestone flags we laid had come from Pennsylvania by train. In the spaces between the flags we encouraged thyme to grow. We had planted apple trees and a fig, both of which fruited. Not so the miniature Valencia orange tree which we had put directly in the path from the garden gate to the front door. Chinese feng shui tells us that evil travels in a straight line and can be averted by obstacles in its path!

That garden room also accommodated lavender, sage, rosemary and a nandina to protect the house. During most of the year our live Noble fir lived in a planter box on wheels in a corner, brought into the living room at Christmas and trimmed. Two large planters had been placed so as to catch the sun on the micro greens we hoped to grow, but the neighborhood cats scrubbed that plan, and instead I put in lily and freesia bulbs.

Other features of the garden were our neighbor’s tall flowering pear which burst into white bloom in February and the Hawaiian wedding tree which dropped trumpet shaped blooms in the fall. In April I didn’t feel the need to water anything, but in the hot weather I often cooled everything down with sprayed water. We hung our white rope hammock then too, which took up just the right amount of space.

In short, the garden room was full of history and stories, which contributed to its beauty. We had taken tables out and served tea and supper there. At night I listened to the latch at the gate being lifted when Don came home from a late night shoot. In a wet year I picked snails with three-year-old Abel, the sharp-eyed son of a friend, and carried them out to the nearby lawn. And always this garden was the changing backdrop for our sparsely-furnished living room.

Thus in April, my favorite place was lying in the sun beside the open screen door as if I were outdoors, in beauty. But the house was also shabby. The carpet was so frayed and dirty the carpet-cleaner had refused when we requested his services; the paint on all the doors was chipped and peeling; and we had never invited our upper middle class friends for fear of their censure of our circumstances. For years it was heated only by fires and the occasional space heater. I thought of it as a tent, a mostly clean space for living in the beautiful woods called Meadow Oaks.

I thought about beauty quite a lot, and still do. Partly as a counter to the stiff conventional ideal of it many people seem to hold. And partly because I find it essential, to live and breathe it. But also because it is so hard to hold on to, to see. We seem to need it framed for us, to be surprised by it, or have it set in a remembered past. When we live in it, and we all do always and everywhere, we don’t see it. We blow it off and refuse to believe in it. 

People perceive goodness and truth to be inside of their minds and bodies, but they see beauty as outside of themselves. Not so, in my estimation. Beauty is a harmonic, the degree to which we are in tune with the deepest rhythms of reality. Born of our mothers and fathers, we develop control over our habits as we grow older, becoming healthy people, flowering as we are able. Even when we are sick or miserable, the return to balance is a realignment with our natural beauty.

The poet and anthropologist Frederick Turner, in his book Beauty, The Value of Values [1991], associates beauty and shame: “Beauty exists only in the accepted presence of shame.” As modern people, we deflect our shame (for the physicality of our reproductive and consuming selves, for the inequality of the gifts we have been given, for our painful awareness of our uniqueness and aloneness) into the more comfortable states of guilt and critique. But owning up to our shame as humans, we find ourselves in the presence of beauty. For Turner, art and religious ritual helped us accept and therefore evolve out of the desperate and shameful animals we came from and believe in our own beauty.

I have always sought places and made small rituals around them which celebrate beauty. It might be a particular tree which provided a chiaroscuro light which I could enjoy on the page of a notebook in which I was writing. The steam coming off a cup of hot tea, drunk in a ritual manner. A path through a garden which was always surprising at the same time as being familiar. Imagining Chinese Taoist poets helped me find these special places. They also enabled me to keep my living spaces simple so as to enjoy the sweep and change of nature as it blew through them. This might seem to be a static process, but to feel the harmonic at the base of the world, some quiet is needed. 

Turner, in the book mentioned above, brings to bear “the new mathematics, physics, and chemistry of nonlinear nondeterministic dynamical systems” to show that “beauty is the creative principle of the universe, the feedback process that generates an ordered world with a chaotic boundary in time.” It is also the fundamental source of truth and at the core of our moral conscience. Turner’s description of the world has, for a long time now, underpinned my own worldview.

We have been a bit ashamed of our own new home, for no other reason than that it is in a part of Los Angeles which is never mentioned when middle class real estate is discussed. Our neighborhood is quiet and has all the amenities we need, although admittedly a nearby grocery with organic produce in it would be appreciated!

Now, my favorite, most beautiful time of the day is after our evening wine and snacks, when we turn on the lamp and Don settles down on the old sofa to read aloud. He is reading our friend Anders Dunker’s new collection of dialogs with philosophers and scientists, Rediscovering Earth. Each one is full of ideas regarding the climate crisis in which we are already living. “If we want finally to bridge the gap between knowledge and action, we must rediscover the earth, identify ourselves more fully as earthlings, and realize that our future and that of the planet are one and the same.”