Did you know there is a dedicated society for watching clouds? It’s called the Cloud Appreciation Society. They have a website. You can even get a certificate authenticating your membership. They love clouds, and I do too.
There is something about clouds that pulls my attention upward. They seem to call me to imagine what it would be like to touch one, to stand on the top of a towering cumulonimbus. There is an invitation.
Beauty does that. It draws us near. It invites us to something – but to what?
Therapy – A Bleak Landscape
Providing therapy can become a lonesome endeavor. When you are early on in your career you have a supervisor that you meet with weekly for an hour to discuss cases, but that tends to be the extent of any sort of community. If you are purposeful, you might make friends with other therapists as well.
But often there is this isolation that sets in. You alone know exactly the burden of each of your clients. You can’t go into detail with your friends and family. And maybe you wouldn’t even want to because that itself might be more exhausting. Yet you still hold numerous stories of heartache, hopelessness, trauma, and despair.
Along with this lonesomeness, I have found myself working through the expectation I assume my clients have of me. They come to me for a reason, something is wrong, uncomfortable, or unbearable, and they want me to do something about it. Often I feel like there is nothing I can do about it. I start to sink into their hopelessness. The fear of disappointing them pushes me down further. It becomes a bleak situation.
I begin questioning my value as a therapist. A list of “shoulds” piles up – I should know what to do. I should have an answer. I should be better. And then fear sets in. How will I handle next time? Are they going to be angry with me? Will I fail them? Gloom has taken over my mental space, even the physical space of my office.
A small voice in a corner of my mind suggests a walk. That sounds nice, better than staying in here with this. So, I grab my coat and walk out into a blustery day. The sky is blue and patched with white puffy cumulus clouds.
The wind thieves some of my warmth but it also cuts through the lethargic dreariness. I take in a full breath of icy air and my senses block out my thoughts. I walk toward the pair of small ponds about a half mile from our practice. It’s good to move and I can already feel warmth emerging inside me from the movement.
I wind my way to the top of a set of stairs that leads down toward the ponds. The elevation offers an expansive view of the landscape below as well as the open skies above. There, I feel an invitation to look upward. The cumulus clouds lingering in the sky are drifting slowly eastward. It looks warm up there.
Not realizing it, I’ve completely stopped and allowed myself to just watch the slow, billowing clouds. It’s cold out. And I’m warm.
Beauty – A Definition
When asked what beauty is, the late Irish poet and mystic John O’Donohue suggested that beauty is a kind of homecoming, a remembrance of something we already knew. And in this homecoming, beauty is an invitation into becoming who we truly are.
Rather than simply a neutral sense of loveliness we receive, it seems that beauty is active. It pulls us in and has something to offer.
Clouds in Yosemite
When I was young my family took a trip out west to California. My uncle has lived there for as long as I have been alive, so he hosted us and gave us a tour of some of the best spots around. One of the days we set out to visit Yosemite, a national park known for its magnificent waterfalls and mountainous vistas.
We arrived at one of the first stops, a lookout point. As I exited the car, my little body couldn’t see yet what the lookout point was looking out toward, so I raced my way closer to get a better look. I scurried up a small boulder and as I stood up, the vastest expanse opened before me.
As far as my eye could see was mountain upon mountain. There in front of it all was the famous Half Dome peak. And up above, making patchwork of the azure blue sky were bright and billowy cumulous clouds drifting slowly into the expanse. My little mind was stunned. I had never been here before, yet it seemed familiar. I remember feeling so warm and so light, like in a dream.
Holding the Line of Hope
Experiencing beauty sometimes feels like a luxury – like you need a ticket to a museum or a week off work to go find it. But beauty is less of a luxury and more of a necessity. And with that, less something behind closed doors or miles away in a national park, and more available, even calling us right above our head – like the clouds drifting by nearly every day.
In the world of interpersonal neurobiology, it is said that we become what we give our attention to. I can feel that, even in small ways day to day. When all I see is the bleak landscape, the hopelessness and despair of my clients, the self-doubt and fear within me, I can feel my mood shift and my hope fail. And after days of this with no reprieve, a belief begins to take shape that maybe this gloom is our core reality.
In the bleakness that is our world, the gloom that sets in around us during a session, or a difficult week of clients, beauty is a necessary antidote to despair.
We need something that calls to us, draws us and our attention out of the mirk and mire and up toward sky. Something that invites us to remember the places inside of us that once were home, filled with warmth, openness, and love.
We need a homecoming.
For some of us that homecoming is a coming back to those days like I had in Yosemite or to an actual home we had growing up that was safe and warm and full of love. Yet, even in a good home there are still wounds that can close doors off to home inside us.
Others of us weren’t so lucky. The home and family we were born into never truly felt like home. That deep and inner sense of and need for safety and warmth and love was never given the chance to breathe, never allowed the experience firsthand in the world. A true sense of home became a fairytale, even a lie that couldn’t be trusted.
Either way, beauty calls us to remember what once was or believe that what was stolen at birth or trampled upon early on can once again be received and recovered. Beauty invites us to come home.
It is in this homecoming that we can begin to hold the line for hope as others fall into despair. We begin to see that beauty is not just in the skies, not just in the place of home within ourselves, but it is also within every client we see – no matter how bleak the landscape before us. We hold the line of hope because we know, as Meister Eckhart once said,
There is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch.
That place is called home.
The beauty is that there is always hope.
And a homecoming is never out of reach.
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Additional Resources:
Here is the interview with John O’Donohue where he discusses his thoughts about beauty. I highly suggest you give it a listen.