Beauty and the Shapeshifter

What does it mean to live in a world where beauty is everywhere and yet nowhere? Where our eyes are flooded with polished images, but our hearts are left untouched? We scroll through a thousand faces, bodies, and lives each day, each one smoothed and perfected, or generated by AI – strangely hollow avatars, like shells washed up on the tide, gleaming but empty.

Across society we are schooled to present ourselves as if living inside a glasshouse – trimmed, pruned, endlessly on display. The longing to belong, ancient as hunger itself, is easily turned against us. We bend and mould ourselves to fit the tribe, shifting shape until the mask of acceptance feels more real than our own skin. What does this striving give us, except exhaustion? What do we lose when belonging is bought at the cost of authenticity?

These standards were not born of soil or sea. They are illusions, manufactured to keep us striving, consuming, performing. Beneath the glamour lies estrangement – from land, from kinship, from the inner ground of our own being. What masquerades as beauty is often no more than a loop of spectacle and approval: endless mirrors reflecting nothing back.

Yet autumn, the season of water, offers us another way of seeing. Water is the great shapeshifter of the elements. It drifts as mist across a valley at dawn, gathers as cloud, falls as rain. It swells into flood, freezes into blade, softens into spring. Its changes are not for show. Water does not seek applause for its transformations. It shifts because shifting is its nature, carrying memory of source and sea alike. In this we glimpse another kind of beauty: one not bound to surfaces, but to essence, movement, and return.

Myth carries this memory too. In Ireland we speak of sacred wells and rivers, each guarded by its own spirit, for to drink of those waters was to taste wisdom, to drink of healing. In Greek myth, Narcissus leans too long over his reflection and forgets to live. Our stories remind us that beauty without depth is dangerous – a glamour that ensnares rather than frees. True beauty unsettles. It beckons us back to the marrow of things: to Brigid’s flame that burns to illumine, not to consume; to the Cailleach’s storm that strips away falseness so renewal can come.

And what of the beauty that is not polished, not performed? A hawthorn blooming unseen in a hedgerow. A murmuration of starlings wheeling at dusk. A face lined by time and weather, carrying stories more enduring than smoothness. Such beauty cannot be consumed or possessed. It asks nothing of us but presence. It frees us, reconciles us, restores us.

There is another way of dwelling with beauty – one that does not demand performance, but invites intimacy. To live with beauty in this way is to walk more slowly, to move in rhythm with earth’s own breath, to let the seasons shape us as rivers shape stone. Small gestures – making, tending, offering – become vessels for spirit. They are not commodities but invitations: doorways through which beauty may be met as truth rather than illusion, as presence rather than spectacle.

In a culture that mistakes display for belonging, perhaps our task is to learn again how to meet beauty as we meet water: not as a mirror that flatters, but as a living presence that carries us deeper into kinship. Water wears many faces, yet always returns to the source. So may we – finding in beauty not a demand to perform, but a path back to one another, to the more-than-human world, and to the quiet enchantment of being at home here once more.

Like the surface of wild clay as it dries, peeling back to reveal darker sediment beneath, beauty is not only what lies on top. Cracks and fissures appear, showing us another layer of being. This descent belongs to the season we now enter – water folding into earth, autumn carrying us toward winter. It is emotional release, a kind of elemental alchemy, a descent that brings us into inner peace. Both are lunar principles on the Celtic Wheel, reminding us that depth is revealed not in gloss, but in surrender, in uncovering, in allowing the hidden to come forth.

This reflection is part of 'Sanctuary of the Waters: Where Beauty Comes to Rest' , my Autumn / Water Element 2025 newsletter. The full letter will be shared shortly – you are warmly invited to join here.