I recently ran across the term “moral beauty.” As is often the case with such terms, this expression refers to a battery of actions most likely practiced by people ever since one human first looked into the face of another—even without a formal name for those actions. 

Moral beauty refers to the ways in which we are good to ourselves and, most especially, how we foster positive interchanges with others. One way to attempt finding the threads of our own moral beauty is to become mindful about ourselves, and if possible, about those around us. That is, each of us should haul in our frantic lifestyle of doing-and-doing-and-doing and really look at ourselves as a being—and study the nature of our being who we be. A deep look inside ourselves probably will reveal more beauty than we ever imagined, will reveal at least some of the ways we are good and humane, the ways in which we make life easier for others. 

We also need to extend this practice of moral beauty to both wild beings and to inanimate objects, e.g., forests, prairies, mountains, oceans and rivers. But we may not fare so well when honestly exploring our interactions with the non-human and inanimate features of Earth’s crust.  

We’ve all heard of various categories of beauty: natural, physical, artistic, musical, literary, architectural, maybe even something mechanical or technical. But moral beauty stems from a mind truly aware of the human condition. It is manifested by positive and soothing actions or words or by sharing a stable and positive silence. Such actions can occur between two or more people during times of triumph and joy, stress or grief, failure or disillusionment. Even during times of quiet mutual respect. 

I suspect that all therapists and counselors would argue that society always needs more people who are active messengers of moral beauty, more people who are known as authors of acts of kindness, those who offer words or actions that serve to stem the waves of anger, aggression, greed, me-ism, depression and loneliness that are currently infecting our entire world society. Those who offer words or actions that serve to weaken the toxic workplace and that do-more-than-yesterday attitude of pressure that fills its hours. 

Paradoxically, the motivation to look deep inside ourselves is often stimulated by a deep immersion in some corner of the outdoors. Consider the following thoughts from various authors:

Steve Callahan once wrote, “I am not a religious man per se. My own cosmology is convoluted and not in line with any particular church or Philosophy. But for me, to go to sea is to glimpse the face of God. At sea I am reminded of my insignificance—of all men’s insignificance. It is a wonderful feeling to be so humbled.” 

Jacques Cousteau once remarked, “For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive. In this century (20th Century) he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.”

Dave Berry once wrote, “When you finally see what goes on underwater, you realize that you’ve been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.”

And I might add that if you’ve never looked closely at that stratum of Earth’s crust made up of the vegetation up to two feet above the soil’s surface to two feet deep into the ground, you’ve missed much of the significance of forests, prairies, deserts and swamps.

Emily Hunter says, “Climate change alone is probably the greatest challenge we humans have ever faced throughout our entire existence. The challenge is so great because the battle is not with external enemies, but a war within ourselves.”

Thomas Berry wrote, “The time has come … to resist the impulse to control, to command, to force, to oppress, and to begin quite humbly to follow the guidance of the larger community on which all life depends. Our fulfillment is not in our isolated human grandeur, but in our intimacy with the larger earth community, for this is also the larger dimension of our being.”

Former national poet laurate, Leslie Marmon Silko, had these thoughts: “All places and all beings of earth are sacred. It is dangerous to designate some places sacred when all are sacred. Such compromises imply that there is a hierarchy of value, with some places and some living beings not as important as others. No part of the earth is expendable; the earth is a whole that cannot be fragmented, as it has been by the destroyers’ mentality of the Industrial Age.”

And oceanographer Rachel Carson, in her famous book, The Sea Around Us, wrote, “For the sea lies all about us … The continents themselves dissolve and pass to the sea, in grain after grain of eroded land. So the rains that rose from it (the oceans) return again in rivers. In its mysterious past it (the oceans) encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end … the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea.”