Beyond aesthetic terms, I know humans carry a deep appreciation for behavioural beauty. We experience beauty in kindness, friendship, connection, and love. Even though the rise of social media and consumerism has narrowed the word ‘beauty’ and degraded it to mere glamour, true beauty is not skin-deep but carries the potential to unveil revelations for our kind.
Priyanka Singh PariharOpening the Eyes in Search of Beauty

Beauty awakens the soul to act.
— Dante Alighieri
The human eye absorbs their surroundings. As light reflects on our retina, the electrical signals from the waking world create the scene in our brains. There are millions of spherical eyes seeing a million different worlds, even though they reside on the same sphere, Mother Earth.
The eye is captivated by the light of beauty. Is it the beauty that captures the eye, or the eye that captures the beauty?
A brief pause occurs as the eyes witness beauty. The expansion of pupils is, perhaps, a sign that beauty enlarges life.
Beauty enriches us. Our capacity to experience joy, pleasure, and appreciation is entwined with our receptiveness toward this value. Even in nature, beauty manifests at a high cost.
In the natural world, beings have developed ornaments at the extremities of beauty, demanding attention from potential mates and predators. In his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Charles Darwin suggested that animals and birds evolve with such ornamental features to please the senses of their own species, with the female becoming an active selector, “having a preference for the aesthetically pleasing.” Evolution thus becomes the result of both internal and external factors: natural and sexual selection. There is a freedom and free will that exhibit themselves through this process, as if nature within every being is awakened in its rawest form.
Contemporary American biologists Michael J. Ryan and Richard O. Prum, studying animal behaviour, evolution, and beauty, suggest that female preferences toward aesthetic appeal play a vital role in the process of evolution.
The behavioural study that shares these preferences among our more than human kin is enticing. Not because experiencing and appreciating beauty are solely human characteristics, but because it demonstrates the unique abilities of other species to understand the world on their own aesthetic terms.
While I certainly cannot delve deeper into the minds of other species, as that is their sacred dimension of knowing, I can explore my human experience of beauty. Beyond aesthetic terms, I know humans carry a deep appreciation for behavioural beauty.
We experience beauty in kindness, friendship, connection, and love. Even though the rise of social media and consumerism has narrowed the word ‘beauty’ and degraded it to mere glamour, true beauty is not skin-deep but carries the potential to unveil revelations for our kind.
A friend of mine once told me, “It’s our duty in friendship to enrich each other’s beauty.” I knew the kind of beauty she meant; it runs deeper in our spirit. Within each of us, nature plants its seeds of beauty; however, it’s covered by the veils of conditioning. Every time we encounter an experience that is truly beautiful, the conditions become favourable for seeds to grow.
The first time I experienced eco-anxiety, I did witness beauty in nature all around me. However, I stood in a dark place, as in those moments it was difficult to see the beauty of humankind. It is difficult to revere the sacredness of humanity in the midst of the climate crisis; to truly revere nature, we must first revere our own kind. Our connection with nature cannot be any better than our connection with each other.
Alfred North Whitehead’s panpsychism suggests that we magnify what we see; this is the principle of the universe, from tiny atoms to human brains to complex entities in nature. We move from potentiality to actuality by internalising our surroundings. However, I would add that we only see what we are receptive to. Millions of spherical eyes are seeing millions of different worlds. We must call on each other to unveil the beauty of our world.
Even though I know more than before, I still know that it is humanly impossible to know everything.
But in the time I have devoted to Planted, I have been moved by the beauty of both people and nature.
My faith in humanity was also restored when I first saw my sister’s infant child. As this new member slowly awakened in our family tree, I knew how beauty and innocence entwined.
So, every time I witness ugliness, I hope to remember that somewhere beneath, the seeds of beauty are buried, struggling to actualise. For I have known beauty as an antidote to the bitterness of the human heart.
I know that opening our spherical eyes and becoming receptive to the beauty of the world is, in itself, a revolution.
Words by Priyanka Singh Parihar, Founder and Editor-in-Chief
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Planting seeds of thought that invite us to root and bloom despite the climate crisis. Seeds is a multidisciplinary writing practice that borrows its wisdom from spiritual, ecological, anthropological, and scientific sources.