....beauty

Yogis,
I’m not sure if it’s because of the time of year. Or how the sun is now sitting a bit lower in the sky. Maybe it’s the cooler nights or it could be the change in the air, but something has the word ‘beauty’ coming to me over and over this week.

Making my way through my days,  I keep finding something that will suddenly catch my eye and my breath, and all I want to do is tell it how beautiful it is. It started me wondering what is beauty.

Here is how the Oxford dictionary defines it. “A combination of qualities, such as shape, color or form that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially sight.” Ok, but seems a bit dry. Too superficial. Beauty feels deeper to me than simply being pleased. I check another source. The Webster dictionary starts with this definition. “The quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses.” About the same, but then it goes on…….

“or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.” Exalts the spirit. Yes! Now that gets more to the depth of what I have been experiencing. An inner stirring. More of an emotion than a thought.

I started consciously watching for beauty as I walked yesterday. I was heading down a street that had suffered major tree damage in the woods along the walkway. Trees and branches, with leaves all now brittle and brown, snapped and twisted, laying crisscrossed over each other in a pile. But right in the middle something bright catches my eye and my heart. A patch of vivid orange flowers sitting on tall stalks amongst the devastation. The type of flower that would typically be found in someone’s well-tended landscape, blooming here in the destruction.

My next door neighbor’s house that was sold when he died last year sits sold but vacant. The grasses now as tall as me, as the house is slowly being consumed by the ivy. The earth will eventually take back what we borrowed from her. But amidst it all rises a plume of pink. His crape myrtle bush surrounded and almost buried, yet sharing her beauty with all that walk by. Beauty cannot be held down.

The way the sun catches the flowers in a flower pot a few doors down. How my neighbor installed a memorial bench in her yard for our lost friend. Beauty.

Its everywhere. Birds flying in perfect formation. The coo of the morning doves. How details of trees appear traced against a blue sky. Dark cloud formations of an incoming storm.

Even in death there is beauty…… Driving to the beach I passed mile after mile of cornfields. Thousands of dried brown stalks sitting in perfect rows, their tops being blown in unison by the breeze. Beauty.

What exalts your spirit? The more you look for beauty, the more she rolls to your feet.

Being stirred,
SARAH