High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘beauty’

The trees looked as if I’d caught them in the middle of a ballet, the little pine pirouetting center stage.

If I turned away, or closed my eyes, I was almost sure the dance would resume, strains of Tchaikovsky wafting up from the snow.

How delicate the etched branches!   How gracefully outstretched!  And, oh, the sparkle and glisten there in the morning light, the incredible depth of the silence.

It took every thought from my mind. All I could do was stare, the tiny flecks of dancing snow melting on my eyes, as if I were seeing for the very first time.

Why this beauty?  What is it for?  I didn’t even want to know.  It was enough just to behold it, to stand in the morning’s first light, seeing the woods with new fallen snow.

May the season wrap you in comfort and joy.  May laughter fill your halls and music fill your dreams.  May those you love be near, if only in spirit, and may you feel their warm embrace.

May the child in you revel in wonder and delight.  May you see beauty everywhere.

May kindness flow from your hands.  May your lips speak the love of your heart.

May generosity pour from you in sweet measure.  May you offer peace and good will to all.

May you sense the connection of your soul with all living beings and see nothing that is not alive.

May you rejoice in the grand unfolding drama and overflow with thanks for the part that you play and for the wisdom it brings you.

May you walk beneath a star-filled sky and marvel at the mysteries.  May your heart open to embrace the flowing moments, whatever they may hold.

May you hear the infinite Yes speaking your name and calling you its own.  May you know that all is well, and that you are loved.

Just for the joy of it, the Celestial Artisans took the winds in hand and, infusing them with harmony, wove the fallen pine needles into an intricate design.

While they were at it, they swept the nearby snow into a great, smooth swirl, and lay a sprig of spent seed pods atop it as an accent.

It didn’t matter to them whether any mere human would notice these particular creations.  But if one did, by chance, perhaps her spirit would dance to their rhythms and see in them a reflection of the invisible joy that brought them into being.  That was their secret hope.

Yet it was enough for the Artisans simply to create their designs.  It’s what they exist to do—to translate divine love into kaleidoscopic patterns and form, to instill material existence with harmony and beauty.  That is their mission, their worship, and their play.  And in it they find great fulfillment and joy.

When beauty rains down, showering you in its reality, bathing you in its grace, washing you in its freshness, give thanks, that it may come to you again.

When beauty rains down, carrying starlight and all the cosmic colors, pouring out its symphonies, flooding you with its oceanic joy, give thanks, that beauty may visit you again.

When beauty drenches you in wonder and dissolves all your walls, when it steeps you in its tenderness and sets your heart free, give thanks.  Give thanks.  Give thanks.

When last I saw the wetlands, they were alive with summer’s colors.  Between the ranks of reeds, mallards floated on high waters. Bullfrogs twanged their bass notes from lily pads.  Bees buzzed among rainbow heaps of wildflowers and the leafy trees danced to the sweet symphonies of countless singing birds.

Now, everything had changed.  At first glance, the place seemed colorless and drained, and the air was incredibly still.  The only things I could hear as I walked the trail around its circumference were the crunch of fallen sycamore leaves beneath my boots and my own breathing.

But as I walked, allowing my thoughts to still, the silence surrounding me took on the feel of holiness, and my mind opened to the depth of the beauty before me.

A masterpiece of reinvention was spread before my eyes.  Soft spent goldenrod danced in the breeze, and beneath an azure sky, bleached reeds shimmered in the sun.  Where the waters had receded vast swaths of mossy earth stretched in hues of olive and ocher.

This was November’s homage to the changing seasons, a creation made of long nights and short days, her own variation on the wetland’s theme.  And the more I looked, the more beauty I saw in this transposition of the song into mid-autumn’s key.

The bank of clouds floated in swiftly from the west, the final curtain on autumn’s glorious show.  And in the last golden rays of the late afternoon sun, just before it the clouds dimmed its light, the great trees bowed their gold and crimson heads in farewell.

Their final hour had been a pageant of unparalleled splendor, the leaves aflame and glowing more intensely with ever passing moment in one pure, trumpeting crescendo of joy.   Each tree, each branch, each leaf played its perfect part, and each was the perfect complement to the other.  Their harmony was unmatched; their beauty flawless.

I felt as if I were watching some majestic ritual, performed by beings of a simpler, wiser order than my own.

And now the clouds had come, and the colors faded quickly away.  The night would bring hard rains and strong winds, and in the morning, all that would be left were a few streamers of red and yellow dangling from bare branches, and stagehands sweeping the floor.

But it had been my privilege to witness the colors’ regal farewell.  And in the stark months that lay ahead, over and over my heart would recall their haunting, lovely song.

Beauty walked the field, palette in hand, and everywhere she went she left splashes of joy.  Not a twig, not a shaft of grass escaped her.

She left a banquet for the eye, a feast of color spread beneath the sky for all to see.  And all of it was meant as an invitation.

Come, it said, drink of the season’s delights.  Taste the spice of the harvest time, sharp and pungent and sweet.  Let it linger on your tongue; let its fragrance flow into you like clouds of ecstasy and heal all your sorrows.  I give it to you for your pleasure, from the depths of my joy, to remind you of life’s goodness and treasures.

Every atom has its purpose; every seed, every petal has its place.  Nothing is forgotten, or lost.  Everything is as it should be.  Let there be joy in your heart and celebration.

All is well.  You are loved.

“We live by admiration, hope and love; and even as these are well and wisely fixed, in dignity of being we ascend.” ~William Wordsworth

Its flowers spent, its colors gone where summers go, without having made itself memorable in any way that men might reckon, it reached toward the sky to write the final stanza of its poem.

It had no way of knowing that its form would catch my eye and be a subject for my camera’s lens, that I would bring it here for you to contemplate and approve.  Approval wasn’t part of its vocabulary.

It wrote the stark grace of its being against the sky only because it had given itself to joy from the very beginning and would do nothing else but sing it to the very end.

It was that song that called me to it, that stopped me in my tracks and took my breath away.

Something like reverence welled up inside me as I stood before it, the damp wind connecting us, and after I gathered its image, I could not help but bow my head before it in salute, my heart reverberating to its beautiful amen.

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If it all fell apart tomorrow, if all that I cherished disappeared, all I believed proved untrue, still I would have to say Thank You for the beauty of an October Day.

Thank you for the miracles of grasshoppers and autumn fields, for the cycles of seasons so precisely timed.

Thank you for eyes that can see, a mind that can wonder, a spirit that can ride sweeping currents of awe.

Thank you for this day, and this path, and this walking of it, here, beneath dancing leaves in the warm October sun.

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You don’t have to believe in hope, in goodness, in love.  You can chalk it all up to physics if you want to.  (Although that seems a bit of a stretch to me.)

Its okay if you think the perception of beauty is nothing more than a learned response to patterns of stimuli, or that the whole wondrous cosmos (with its spinning galaxies and beating hearts and all) has no consciousness perpetually giving birth to it.

But I have to tell you that when I see salmon chrysanthemums cupping little earth-globes in their centers, something happens inside me that mathematics just can’t explain.

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