Into the Well of Beauty

This essay was originally written as part of my work on the New Order of Druids‘ Bardic course.

I find it hard to venerate the sacred or the divine, being perfectly honest. Part of that is the “let things be things” attitude that is part of who I am. Venerating and respecting, however, are separate things.

We talk about the whole world around us having personality; we animate almost everything: Architecture can be aggressive, eccentric, or welcoming. Colours are warm or cool. Flavours are hearty or indifferent. A cheap and fruity rosé might even be called flirty. I have known a car called Penelope. Humans layer meaning on everything as a way of interacting with it.

Animism is something that has always interested me. I was recently in Kyoto, where Shinto practices live on, and there was something both fascinating and comforting in seeing shrines, that I first though were bus shelters, maintained and looked after in recognition of the local kami. Whether guardian spirits existed in a ‘material’ sense is, in a way, irrelevant; people created links with the landscape. I remember reading a story of a man in Oakland, USA, who placed a statue of Buddha that he bought in a local hardware store on a street corner to dissuade people from dumping rubbish there, and over time it turned into a bustling, cared-for, and dedicated shrine. Everybody knows the shrine isn’t ancient, but by changing what the space meant, they behaved differently around it.