spring

Every time I arrange fresh flowers, I choose the blossoms from my garden and the vase from my shelf so that color and form complement each other. Four days later, I see the vermilion rose is developing a silver sheen that would be enhanced in pewter. I choose a new vase; I honor the aging; I create a new form. Just as order and beauty are crucial to a floral arrangement, so order and beauty are necessary for the well-being of my soul. They mirror each other.

All through her life, nature had been for Madeleva "beauty's self and beauty's giver." Through it, the divine revealed itself in natural ephiphanies:

Can I not find you in all winds that blow,
In the wild loneliness of lark and plover,
In slender shadow trees upon the snow?

This poem suggests that her prayers had gone beyond words; apparently, only silence could express them. If simplicity, in prayer as in life, is a sign of maturing sanctity, then Madeleva's inner life would seem to have deepened through the years.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry.

All of the sense organs are both organs and capacity. The synthesizing acting of the heart continuously creates a unity of the inner world and outer world. Moments in which we perceive this unity are moments of the experience of beauty. Beauty is thus a consciousness of the heart. The heart has always been connected with love due to this relation between bringing what seems to be separated into conjoining as profound beauty.

The heart always has an object of love; it is always attracted to some sign of beauty. Whatever the heart holds its attention on, it will acquire its qualities. Rumi said, "If your thought is a rose, you are rose garden. If your thought is a thorn, you are kindling for the stove." Being between the attraction of the physical world and the ego, on the one hand, and spirit and its qualities on the other, the heart is pulled from different sides. But ultimately behind all these various attractions lies one great Attractor.

Only in solitude can you discover a sense of your own beauty. The Divine Artist sent no one here without the depth and light of divine beauty. This beauty is frequently concealed behind the dull facade of routine. Only in your solitude will you come upon your own beauty.

BEAUTY is composed of many things and never stands alone. It is part of horizons, blue in the distance, great primeval silences, knowledge of all things of earth.  It is so fragile it can be destroyed by a sound or a thought. It may be infinitesimally small or encompass the universe itself. It comes in a swift conception wherever nature has not been disturbed.

Beauty springs from the soul of the beholder.

When we adhere to the belief system of love, and have thoughts only of God, we begin to understand why our true identities are ultimately found in our love rather than in our bodies. We are each the essence of love. Peace and happiness are at the center of the heart of love. There is a complete absence of fear and guilt, and there is diminishing pain and misery; there are only loving and forgiving thoughts. Within this belief system, love and life are eternal.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.