The good, the united, and the true in this world will always be somehow beautiful too, and beautiful souls will recognise it immediately.*
(Richard Rohr)

Specialisation, as I will keep insisting, comes with side effects, one of which is separating labour from the fruits of labour.**
(Nassim Taleb)

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, sings Mary Poppins, but life is more than something to be got through with some sugaring up from time to time.

A world of asynchronous work – prescribed technology as Ursula Franklin names it – leaves us more loathing than loving, more disconnected and numbed.

But work should be beautiful: from urge to idea to implementing to realising. Beauty is not only to be discovered in the work we do, but also in the people we are becoming – the two are connected, indwelling our responses to the two critical questions of Who is my True Self? and What is my contribution (work)?:

Our deepest self-knowledge unfolds as we are embraced by Beauty.^

John O’Donohue, whose words these are, holds my attention further as he writes about how,

the Beautiful [presents] as a threshold which holds the real and the ideal in connection and conversation with each other^.

Which connects in my thoughts to Wallace Stevens’ thinking about the pressure of reality being met by the power of imagination to create something new, and, if so, Beauty is the child of this union.

Do not underestimate the power of your imagination, fuelled by your values, your talents and your energies. Identify these with as much detail as you are able and the Beautiful will begin to come into view.

(*From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.)
(**From Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.)