Under a leaning yellow willow tree, a Czech woman in a red coat sits still, staring into her Sixties, long black hair like the fine, forlorn branches, tickled by cold March fingers. Two boys walk past, just cubs testing strength: elbowing and flicking each other; never still with never-men giggles.

It is hearing rain falling after a drought, the sound of a donkey’s braying, the scent of cardamom and cloves, the sight of the first slim green fingers of new grass in Spring, the knowing that old scripts in one’s mind are being replaced by new ones.

It derives from the gifts of the universe and the gifts we give back. Beauty in its complexity moves us to celebrate life in its vagaries; its simplicity and resonant harmony enables delight and understanding, our making peace, our moving forward.

On a bright but cool summer morning, my father is casting a fly rod out over the pond, his fishline arcing across the napoleon-blue sky; Shubert’s “Trout Quintet” swims softly from an open window; in a nearby field, my beautiful horse with the golden mane stops grazing and stands at ease, his ears relaxed as he connects effortlessly with the music, and I know that he is at prayer.

When I’m open to it, all my senses are engaged and combine to create an experience beyond each individual sense. In my work I try to recreate, not the subject, but that effect, which is beauty. This planet is its epitome.

I found art. I found language. I found essence in the natural world fortifying itself into form. I don’t know how I did — a lucky sequence of accidents, I guess. But when I saw beauty pushing up and into moments, I was startled alert. Alert and activated. Hungry for what feels divine.

Beauty is found in the paradox of the ephemeral and the eternal: of flesh and spirit, of breath and bone, of the broken and the whole, of the flower and the stone.

It strikes me that I write poetry the same way my four-year-old boy drinks grape pop. I love the taste of it, the mess of it, the attempt to control it, and once it’s done I love to talk about it all happened. I have other, bigger picture thoughts on poetry, but right now I’m enjoying the delightfulness of this idea.

It is seen in the loveliness everywhere around us, heard in inspired music, felt when we witness a noble deed, when we experience ecstatic or self-forgetful love. Beauty is not different for the sake of it, though it often seems to strain at the boundaries it heals rather than breaks, but wherever it is found we feel uniqueness, a specialness (even if it is the nth sunset we have seen!) which is the mark of the personal… for me, beauty is the breath of God flowing through his creation.

Can poems about a famous disaster which caused a tragic loss of life truly be called beautiful? In contemplating this question, I am reminded of two very different poems. The first is an excerpt from a poem by the fictional Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings, which begins “The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.”

Color. I choose color. Although I also choose the night sky with its fiery silver stars and no other colors at all. I choose flowers, especially the ones that lure my vision into their entrancing center. Poppies, columbine, the daffodil. I choose silk or moss or certain musics.

My grandmother once said to find the beauty within every person, every object, because they were “that of God”. This is Quaker-Mennonite-Amish-talk for the concept that God is everywhere, in all things, and we have to find the hidden kindness, or special aspect, because God is somewhere inside.

Beauty resides deep within. Sometimes it ventures out to show itself. Beauty is the most intimate thing. Beauty is what is in the moment – the memories may fade away in time or, if we are fortunate enough, they could stay with us forever. Beauty is everywhere.

I believe that beauty in poetry comes from the combination of words, images, and emotions. Even a horrific subject like war or a mundane subject like socks (a la Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks”) can be made somehow beautiful with words. For me, in the writing process, this often involves focusing on the sounds in a poem—vowel or consonant sounds—and looking for sound echoes.

I have always, from childhood, felt a yearning for the beauty which is to be found in the human presence, in areas of our lives like neighbourhood and community, the smaller communities, the villages, the lived-in countryside, very often. Many of my poems seem to focus on those places and moments where the human world and the wider natural one meet and fuse.

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I’ve come to realize that beauty arises from, and is the essence of existence. We cannot exist (long) without it, nor can we define it. It is like Buddha nature, it is there, independent of us – it does not require us, we require it. Children innately understand beauty, as we age we begin to seek it. We would be better served remembering the advice of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Our job is merely to allow beauty in all of its shapes and forms.

Beauty is the self. One can feel it, realize its all pervading existence only when one tries to see for oneself; within oneself. A spectrum can be seen in a glass prism, crystal, diamond or even a water droplet – only when white light shines on it. That essential white light is beauty – like the self within.

The animals still alive in the forest of my memories are cut into two – diagonally – by a scarlet river which connects the cold earth to a sky filled with bright stars.