The Value of Beauty
Beauty has been on my mind a lot lately because I’m trying to spruce up our church building and roping other women in to help me with that. This has caused me to think not only about the methods of creating beauty but the end result of creating that beauty. I love that we don’t really have to tell most girls to take an interest in their environment. Given half a second, most women of any age will want to make the space they’re in beautiful. Yes, we may all think different things are beautiful because there is a level of subjectivity to beauty, but we all want beauty surrounding us. Little girls will tell you what color they want their room painted and pick out their comforters. Most of us look forward to the day we have our own place and can decorate how we want, be that movie posters or floral wallpaper. We women may not often be the Michelangelos of the world, but we will almost always create beauty where we are, come hell or high water, literally.
But is beauty important? Is it important in our homes? Does it serve any other purpose other than to give us something nice to look at? Is it purely eye-candy? If it’s eye-candy, are we in danger of overindulgence?
What is beauty? I don’t want to get into defining objective beauty. I don’t think I’m equipped to do that, and it doesn’t serve our purpose here. I’ll let others argue about the standards for objective beauty. I want to better understand subjective beauty. The beauty that is a large cauldron into which we sprinkle a little bit of this and that and that other thing. This beauty potion that we’re working on in our homes is typically layered and evolving. It’s memories of people, places, and things. It’s art, photos, knickknacks, furniture, and food. It’s nature brought in and fabrics laid around. Each home has a different beauty because each family is unique and our tastes and life experiences are different. (I so love the diversity of other homes!) Each home showcases a different beauty because we are attracted to different things and different things matter to us.
To aid us in developing beauty, let’s look up beauty in the thesaurus. Lovely, splendor, elegance, gracefulness, wellness, wildness, quietude, glory, and calm are all other words for beauty. What a plethora to draw from! Isn’t that exciting? We can vacillate between splendor and calm and create a beautiful home. We can stir together wildness and elegance! We can weave together glory and wellness. All of these things are beautiful and ours to work with.
If we see beauty and we love it, we still have to ask if it is important. Is it worth our time—which is limited and being pulled in three thousand directions—to work on beauty?
I have a thought about this and it is recent, or it’s been latent and I’m tugging it with all my might out into the sunlight, so bear with the evolution of this thought.
Some of us struggle greatly with a fear of happiness. We act as if it is a sin to delight. We like joy, but we run from happiness as if joy isn’t some profound, deep, and lasting happiness. When we run from delight (this is my favorite word for happiness, I mean it looks like what it is, delight. It sounds like what it is, delight) we’re running away from beauty, because beauty delights in the Creator who created. We don’t maintain a good, comforting, merry attitude through sheer willpower and we’re not somehow better than others if we’re miserable. Beauty can help us maintain a good attitude in ouselves and our familes, which is to say, beauty is a way of promoting good health in our people. There’s the method and the result. If we want healthy people we have to work on beauty because beauty is part of being mentally, emotionally, and physically healthy.
When we try to not have beauty in our homes, we end up living with grumpiness, struggling with attitude issues, and growing our anxiety.
Can we be grumpy in a beautiful environment? Obviously. We humans are adept at being grumpy in the best cases. We all struggle with being self-focused and annoyed when things don’t go our way. We can also become blind to the beauty around us due to familiarity. We have to watch those things and work on not being whiny. But we also don’t need to make the job harder on ourselves by forcing a smile in a sterile, boring, cold environment. Would you rather work on being cheerful with flowers around you? Of course you would. Fortitude demands we be cheerful without the flowers, but prudence calms us and says we should get the flowers if we can. Prudence says to get help and beauty is helpful.
Being snippy, catty, or complaining can happen in beauty and in ugliness, but when we welcome our husbands, children, and friends in close, we’ll be much better equipped to calmly love them when we are welcoming them into our expressions of beauty. When we feel that rush of anger that signals attitude problems, that is a good time to breathe in deeply of the beauty around us. Focus on a point in the room that you love. I often look at my hutch or apothecary because these have served so many and have been passed down to me from women I love. I find them beautiful. They remind me that my mother and grandmothers did this work and so can I. I look at the flowers and the throws and I remember I’m doing this work for these people who I’m snapping at. The beauty fortifies me when I’m slipping into complaining or frustration.
Anxiety can be a great struggle for many of us and there are lots of reasons why, but a lack of beauty pushes anxiety into high gear. Why? Because beauty is calming, settling, and produces happiness. It’s extremely hard to be anxious when you’re happy. As obvious as that sounds, we often forget it. Part of gardening our hearts and hearths is growing happiness. This is a good thing to do, ladies. The happier we are in our homes the happier our people will be. Get you some flowers. Plant some bulbs. “But Abby, I don’t have time to garden, and I don’t want to!” Go buy some flowers! “But Abby, I can’t afford to buy flowers.” Then stop on the side of the road and cut some. Be creative. Think outside the box. Talk to your knitting circle. Someone who grows flowers may be willing to share. I’m so unbelievably thankful that I read The Art of Homemaking at an early stage. The author, Edith Schaeffer at one point said that if you only have a dollar, you spend fifty cents on bread and fifty cents on flowers. I have always clung to that with a death grip. Beauty is important even if you’re poor. I have a dear friend with an extremely limited income. She begs for seeds, cuttings, and bulbs. I adore her backyard. It is so full of overgrown life. She reminds me all the time that beauty doesn’t require a second mortgage.
We have hundreds of thrift stores. We have internet exchanges where people are begging their neighbors to take their stuff. We are only limited by our own hesitation, ladies. If we can’t do flowers, or art, or throws, or pillows, let’s think about the music of our homes. Spotify is free. The music that we play in our homes creates an environment. From classical to heavy metal, depending on our tastes, moods can be lifted by music. When it was cleaning day as kids, Mom often played John Denver. It got everyone up and going and smiling and singing. Sunday morning was Judy Rogers or The Messiah. It signaled that the Lord’s Day was here and to be respected. Christmas music was played all December long…and at other times too. Music is a wonderful gift to use in our homes to create beauty.
I am growing more convinced that if we are anxious, discouraged, and cold we should check our décor, music, and the amount of nature we’re bringing in. Are our homes beautiful? Not perfect. Not Pinterest or Instagram, but delightful, joyous, happy. Are our homes beautiful to us? Do they showcase the same beauty God showcases in creation? Colors, textures, layers? Might and minuteness? Seasonal? Delicate and strong? Water and plants, wood and stone? Looking at nature for beauty inspiration is probably much healthier than spending too much time on social media or at Target. (Neither of those are bad, they just tend to be gifts we overuse or use to grow false guilt or envy or pride.)
If we the homemakers work on producing beauty in our homes, we’re working on creating environments that encourage us and our people to be happy. If we work on the beauty of our home with our people in mind, we will be more likely to be calm, productive, and cheerful in our attitudes. When we put in the work of making couches, beds, and kitchen tables beautiful, we’re welcoming our husbands, children, and dear friends to come sit and rest. And this is the most important part. If you get nothing out of this article except this thought, I’ll be pleased. Beauty only works her magic if we’re doing it for our people. She can’t work if we’re doing it so the world praises us, or we can show off on social media, or with demands of perfection. Beauty only serves us if we are serving others. The home that is sheltering toddlers will be different than the home sheltering teenagers, which will be different than the home sheltering empty-nesters. The home that is also a school will be different than the home that is not. Beauty is important to both, even if it’s different. Our biggest danger with beauty is thinking either it doesn’t matter or thinking it's more important than our people. Beauty matters but our people matter more. Beauty is our handmaid, not our mistress. We utilize the many benefits of the beauty that God put around us to create homes for our people.
There is a feminine chain of creating beauty no matter where we are or what our circumstances are. From prairies to communist countries, in poverty and sickness, all women have figured out how to get flowers, or ribbons, something beautiful. This is part of connecting maid, matron, and crone, our past mothers to our future mothers. We women create beauty. Look at Scandinavian folk art. These women decorated their homes inside and out with just a few cans of paint. Look at the different women in the Looking for the Tenders section of this blog. Over and over again, they harness beauty to tend their people. Many of our chats and posts are sharing beauty from gardens to table settings to art to lighting. We talk about this all the time, not because we’re shallow, but because beauty is a huge element of our profession as homemakers. Why? Because we were created to excel in beauty. We were created to be inspired by beauty. We mirror God’s creativity by creating beauty ourselves. Our souls and our people’s souls are fortified by beauty. Ladies, let’s set our hands to the plow and create beautiful homes for the sake of the health of our people.
