Living In The Field Of Beauty
Details
Sensitize and orient to the Beauty in and around you.
A 5-week online journey into the Devotional Gaze.
Tuesdays 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 June 2026 on Zoom
7pm-8:30pm SAST/ 12pm EST/ 9am PST/ 5pm UK
An Invitation
Whether we’re aware of it or not, we are in constant conversation with life.
There’s an old idea across various indigenous traditions and the mystic poets that says the world wants to be admired by us. When we move through life without really seeing it for what it is, we withhold something the world needs. And our own access to beauty shrinks in the same motion.
Most westerners in big cities have learned to do exactly that. Our attention is annexed by screens and the relentless pressure to produce and perform and manage life, rather than having a good ole chinwag with it. This seemingly small change obscures our ability to relate to what is beautiful in life.
Beauty has been repackaged as something to purchase rather than perceive. It has been flattened into prettiness or perfection, leaving us hungry for something unnamed and largely forgotten. The soul needs beauty as the body needs food. Without it, we stop engaging with life and begin merely enduring it. We become numb.
This course explores beauty as a practice in attention and perception. It is practical and reflective.
We won’t be learning theory. Each week I’ll introduce one idea. We’ll sit with it during our online session. Then you’ll go off with a small task woven into your existing week, a slightly different way of moving through what’s already there.
We’ll work with beauty as a practice, specifically what the Carmelites called “a long, loving look at the real.”
The devotional gaze is simply what happens when you turn toward what’s already present in the ordinariness of your life and actually meet it there.
By the end of five weeks you’ll have a complete practice to return to throughout your life, a distinct way of engaging with beauty that becomes woven into how you move through the world.