One of the things that I love about France -- at least my experience of it -- is that there is not only a deep appreciation of, but also an ability to integrate into daily life a simple elegance, beauty, and a blending of the ancient and the new.
In the mainstream American culture, particularly in the past few decades as the plague of unabated consumerism has infected more and more, 'simplicity' might often be associated in the minds of many with lack, sacrifice, doing without. And just as often, 'simplicity' might be approached as a type of poverty vow.
Rather than an appreciation of simple elegance, there is often an inability to see the unique elegance and singular beauty of simplicity. Rather than defining 'simplicity' as 'just enough' or 'just right' or 'nothing extraneous', one might associate it with squalor or visions of saving slivers of old soap to form a new bar.
In our culture of consumption, there is a greed, or perhaps addiction, to accumulating for the sake of accumulating, and then hoarding what one has accumulated. There is no space that, in a type of froth-mouthed frenzy, isn't seen as something that must be feared and thus filled.
Even beauty, in such a mindset, is something to own, fence, and hoard -- think, for example, of all of the private art collections that turn what might be a living home into a museum of the dead. Because to hoard is to kill and settle into a type of living death; life, after all, must flow.
And yet the hoarding and the consuming never achieves the true goal of providing satisfaction, fulfillment, or meaning. One can entomb one's self with acres of 'stuff' and never fill the enormous void created by separation from Spirit or the feelings of being unloved.
This is one reason for the voracious appetite of the consumption-fed. Like heroine or other addictive substances (including the adrenaline favored by crisis junkies, gamblers, etc.), a short high is quickly replaced by the gnawing and insatiable hunger for more. Whatever is accumulated in such a state of greed cannot be truly appreciated, and true beauty goes unrecognized. Worse, there is no real connection or fulfillment. It's an empty existence, and disconnected from Spirit and others, a very lonely one, indeed. This is what was meant by 'poverty of Spirit' -- a type of impoverishment and bankruptcy that afflicts regardless of one's worldly 'wealth'.
Only by reconnecting with the Spirit and intelligence that flows in, around, and through all things -- only by reconnecting with the sense of One -- can one feel the returning connection with others, with Nature, with beauty, with the elegance of simplicity and having enough. And, ironically, only then can 'a thing' acquired be truly appreciated and enjoyed from a place of knowing that IT isn't what fills us.
And only then does the insatiable greed, the insane hunger that can never be truly fed, melt away into the ocean of Love, plenty, and beautiful simplicity that surrounds and cradles us all along, just awaiting recognition.
Until next time ...
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