Living in the Field of
Beauty
Build a life focused on the creation
and experience of beauty.
Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver
You may be someone others rely on.
You know how to make a plan, keep things moving and pull yourself together when you would prefer to lie face down on the kitchen floor. You have made it through hard things. You have learnt a great deal about yourself along the way.
This is no small thing.
But sometimes we become so practised at getting through life that we forget how to be inside it.
The days begin to feel like a long row of things requiring a response. The email. The body. The bank account. The person who needs something. The washing that has somehow reproduced during the night.
Even lovely things are put to work. A walk must regulate the nervous system. Music must improve the mood. A sunset is expected to make us grateful. After a while, we may realise that we are managing our lives competently while feeling less and less present for them.
Living in the Field of Beauty begins there.
It begins with the possibility that you do not need to wait until everything is fixed before you can enter into a deeper relationship with the world.
Beauty may not change the facts of your life. It cannot pay the electricity bill or make grief pack its bags. But it can reach us inside the life we have. It can soften something that has become hard, return us to our senses and remind us that we are still here.
And that the world is still here too.
When everything becomes something to manage
I call this way of moving through the world Transaction Mode.
Transaction Mode asks practical questions. What is this for? What does it need from me? How quickly can I deal with it? What am I going to get out of it?
We all need this mode. It helps us earn money, make appointments, buy toilet paper and prevent the electricity from being switched off. The trouble comes when we forget that it is only one way of meeting the world.
After a while, people become roles. Moments become units of time. The body becomes an unreliable employee requiring constant supervision. Everything is assessed according to its usefulness.
By evening, we may have dealt with everything and encountered almost nothing.
This is one reason the world can begin to feel flat. We are looking at it, but mostly through the narrow lens of what must be done next. Mystery becomes inconvenient. Pleasure feels indulgent. We rarely allow anything to exist without immediately putting it to work.
It is an exhausting way to live.
And often it began because we were exhausted in the first place.
Transaction Mode may have helped you through illness, grief, financial pressure, overwhelming responsibility or a period when there simply was not enough of you to go around. It has probably served you well.
The invitation is to notice when it has taken over the whole house.
Beauty is more than something pretty
Here, beauty is much wider than prettiness.
It includes the grand and obvious things: music, art, mountains, oceans, astonishing faces. It also appears in stranger places. A chipped bowl. A difficult truth. An ageing hand. A brief exchange with someone in a supermarket.
Beauty can be joyful, tragic, awkward or wild. Sometimes it arrives looking nothing like we expected.
What matters is what happens when we encounter it.
For a moment, our usual habits of perception are interrupted. We stop trying to use, explain or improve what is in front of us. Something reaches us. The world feels larger, more mysterious and more alive than it did a few seconds ago.
Beauty is an event.
It happens between us and the world.
Our capacity to enter that encounter can become buried beneath fear, exhaustion and the endless admin of being a person. But it is still there. And it can be cultivated.
Living in the field of beauty is cultivating an inner state of aliveness so that you're more available to meet beauty in the moment it arrives, whether that moment is passing or something more enduring.
And so that when beauty does arrive, invited or not, you're capable of actually receiving it rather than missing it.
Is this Course for You?
Living in the Field of Beauty may be for you if:
• You are capable and responsible, but tired of experiencing your days as a list of things to manage.
• You have been through illness, burnout, grief or a difficult season and want to feel more connected to the world again.
• You rarely feel surprised, moved or delighted, and miss the part of yourself that did.
• You want to recover your creativity without turning it into another performance target.
• You sense that beauty, mystery and attention have something important to teach you.
• You want practices that can meet you inside an imperfect life, without requiring you to become an entirely different person first.
Dates:
Tuesday 22 September 2026 7pm till 9pm SAST
Tuesday 29 September 2026 7pm till 8:30pm SAST
Tuesday 6 October 2026 7pm till 8:30pm SAST
Tuesday 13 October 2026 7pm till 8:30pm SAST
Tuesday 20 October 2026 7pm till 9pm SAST
Investment:
R1,995 for South African participants.
R2,995 for international participants, approximately $180 USD.
My name is Anél
I’m a facilitator, writer and storyteller.
For more than twenty years, my work has explored how people make meaning, express what is true and remain human in systems that would often prefer us to become efficient little administrative units.
I have worked with people in universities, organisations, healing spaces and community settings. I have also lived with chronic illness for many years, which has given me extensive and entirely unwanted training in disappointment, limitation and staring at ceilings.
Illness made my world smaller. It also made the question behind this course increasingly urgent:
How do we remain in relationship with life when it is not giving us what we want?
Living in the Field of Beauty grew from my attempt to answer that question.
I am teaching this course as a practitioner rather than someone who has reached the summit and is waving encouragingly from the top. I am still learning how to notice, consent, soften and come back into conversation with the world.
I would be honoured to practise alongside you.
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