I'm trying to see. Really see. The beauty all around me (and you) all the time. Something about being able to conceive of how one might communicate a view in paint or pencil gives me insight to beauty, simplifies it to its essence, makes me stop and really see.
Some vistas are puzzles to me. A riddle that I don't yet know the answer to. I haven't discovered the hidden beauty in its jumbled, mid-day, blare. Yet.
But more and more the world is opening up to me. I see the shocking loveliness of light on a warehouse, shadow in the branches. And I am seeking. Always searching the world for the beautiful secrets in its profusion.
What kindness! That God would give these heart-stopping moments of seeing what he has made. Although it be bleared, smeared, full of anguish and struggle . . . well, Gerard Manley Hopkins says it better than I.
God's Grandeur
| THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God. | |
| It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; | |
| It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil | |
| Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? | |
| Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; | 5 |
| And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; | |
| And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil | |
| Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. | |
| And for all this, nature is never spent; | |
| There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; | 10 |
| And though the last lights off the black West went | |
| Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— | |
| Because the Holy Ghost over the bent | |
| World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. |
A new way to think about the given life.
