As McMillan Education celebrates our 70th anniversary of serving as the North Star for families seeking educational guidance, we are all reflecting on our own personal North Stars that have given us direction and purpose throughout our lives. Nationally and globally, events of the past several years have wrecked normality and blown many of us off course, so now we scramble to find our North Stars, to redirect our navigation through life.
When I feel like I’ve lost my way – doom-scrolling reels of imperious poodles stomping word buttons, spinning in cable news-induced existential despair, even mashing my horn angrily when someone cuts me off on I-290 during the hair-raising Worcester rush hour – what is my North Star that always rights my course, returning me to my true self?
Periodically I realize that I must reject what poisons my brain and gnaws away at my peace to return to what nourishes my heart: art, literature, and music. These essential expressions of humanity feed my soul and help me connect to what the Romantic poets called the sublime, which they usually found in astounding natural phenomena like Mont Blanc in France or even a humble daffodil bravely sprouting after a long, dreadful winter. I define the sublime (turn away, you legitimate PhDs) as the connection between our lowly physical world and something ethereal, other-worldly, of the spirit, beyond the material. And while I do appreciate a leisurely stroll through Robert Frost’s proverbial woods – sans bugs, snakes, and even the tiniest smidge of humidity – I connect more effortlessly to the sublime when an artistic creation like a piece of music – anything from the harmonies of Crosby, Stills, & Nash to the lilting Irish melody of one of my favorite hymns, “Be Thou My Vision” – reflects back to me my essential humanity, reminding me of what truly matters: the surprisingly soothing agony of feeling happy and sad simultaneously, the major and minor weaving together to express the blissful pain of the human experience.
At McMillan, we frequently test out brainstorming exercises that may help our rising seniors in composing their college essays. One day we tried the values exercise, in which writers circle a few words out of a long list of options to identify the core values of their lives and identities. After a few minutes of silence we reconvened to discuss our selections. A few women guffawed at the word “beauty” on the list, even joking, “Who would pick that?” I stared down at my page, where I had confidently circled the word “beauty.” I realized that they had interpreted “beauty” as mascara, lipstick, Botox, the objectifying and obsequious efforts women make to appear more acceptable under the public gaze. But for me, “beauty” signifies the sensory experiences or moments that take my breath away, opening the liminal doorway to what the Celts called a ‘thin place’ – where the physical and spiritual meet. Yes, beauty is essential to my soul, and I connect with sublime beauty through literature and the arts, my North Star.
I remember standing in Paris’s Musée D’Orsay for the first time ever, exactly thirty years ago, staring in awe at the indescribable – nay, sublime! – cerulean in Monet’s Nymphéas bleus. My emotional craving for these experiences remained inexplicable to me until many years later when I discovered the brilliant Mary Oliver. Her words tap me on the shoulder, rousing me from a dumb stupor by revealing to me thoughts and feelings I never knew I had. Sister Mary urges, “We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.” Yes, Mary. YES! That ache, that pang I feel in my chest when I hear the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticanaor when I ponder Ezra Pound’s “petals on a wet, black bough” or when I study the rosy blush on a child’s cheek in a Mary Cassatt painting reminds me that I am alive and I am who I am.
The ability of literature, art, and music to find expressions for my awe at the beauty, sadness, pain, joy, bliss around me sustains my soul and serves as my North Star. Pablo Picasso said, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” When the high-fructose corn syrup day-glo orange circus peanut candies of corruption, destruction, and evil lure me away from truth, beauty and love and start to numb that necessary ache with false promises of cheap, voyeuristic, escapist entertainment, I return to what is pure and holy: art, poetry, music – my North Star – to revive the pain of awareness and feel the feelings of life.
