Truth and Beauty

We returned this morning to Cold Canyon for a journal entry workshop. The person leading it, Ed Dawkins, wanted us to focus on Truth and Beauty. My immediate reaction on seeing the workshop advertised was Keats: a romantic’s view of the universe, but there are worse ones… but Dawkins’ counterpart was Whitehead, talking about half-truths and how truth is impossible without beauty.

The first part we were to focus on the beauty within ourselves, and how that shapes our truths. The second section was dwelling in the moment. I was hearing wrentits and hutton’s vireos and, toward the top of the trail, black-headed grosbeaks but we were encouraged to eschew specificity for general input. It was hard, but it was useful.

My mind kept turning to Abu Ghraib. It was inevitable. What role has beauty there? Or truth, for that matter? How will the people who survive that experience—captors or captive—ever experience either truth or beauty again? When Truth, a half-truth informed by ill-informed religious belief, starts to run the world, we are all in for a nasty shock. And worse, if we are at the butt end of a rifle or cigarette. Evil will reign.

Yet there is something here, something that calls. The gray pine—digger pine, foothill pine, ghost pine, pine of more names than we can utter, most of them unuttered by any human—sits in that canyon and is. Is beauty. Is truth. Our job is to attend to it. Otherwise it’s all smoke and mirrors, or dogs in torture chambers.