Writing about ordinary beauty is nothing new, but a reminder never hurts.
*
Finding beauty, we recognize it
thanks to the beauty
within us. Beauty recognizes beauty.
Even in the shattered places
of the world and ourselves,
this beauty,
This.
*
It’s not an isolated phenomenon
separate from ourselves,
other than ourselves –
no – isolation is delusion.
Everything is in relationship,
like the intimate beauty
of walking feet,
here and there,
there
and here.
Nearby,
beauty.
***
1. Light tripped through the forest, picking out moss and lichen textures on a curved branch. Beauty was blooming right there, as much as it blazed in the sunset beyond the trees.
*
2. I clambered down into a hollow carved by the tides that day and steadied my feet on the slick, round rocks. Curtains of mist rolled through Deception Pass. The fog vapor appealed to me, but the jagged intractability of the old anvil of rock did, too. Mist and rock in relationship. With each other, with the trees, the grass, the seaweed, the atmosphere, with me, and now in relationship with you, too.
*
3. I watched a downy feather snagged on a stick as it disappeared under the pier where I stood and waited for it to emerge on the other side, a playful game that never grows old. As the reed and feather floated above the leaves of underwater plants, I pressed the shutter. Then I watched the feather and stick drift out of sight, glad for the gift of slowness.
*
4. Wind enlivens the world, pushes things around and makes new relationships. Makes beauty in unexpected places, too.
*
5. Is it my own too-curvy spine that responds with affection to the curves of the old, half-dead juniper? We exist together, our bones roughened by the weather of time, here in this unsteady world.
*
6. Where the trail hugs the shoreline of Big Beaver Pond, I watched a pond lily leaf arcing downward toward its demise. I imagined water embracing leaf, softening it, and tenderly working it through the transition from life to death.
*
7. As summer’s vigor was subsiding, another pond lily leaf broke the surface just enough to interrupt the dark, gracefully drawn shadow of a stem of sedge. Leaf and stem in relationship, such beauty.
*
8. A tangle of branches filtered the colors of dusk: blue-gray-greens, purples, and stray bits of sunny orange. Ordinary ground and branches on an ordinary day. Beautiful.
***
As “The Marine Detective”said recently, “Stand for truth. Put good into the world. Know the good and beauty around you. And protect the good in yourself, and others.“
