Author: admin

Beauty is multifaceted, and in being so, reaches and connects to an individual in a variety of ways and channels. It’s what keeps us thinking.

rays of sun wrap the
horizon in orange ribbon—
gifting us the day

I do think it’s beautiful when my pen has been circling a subject looking for a way in, and finds it; when I’ve been looking for something as perfect as an egg, and I find that, too. Beautiful.

It may be in the sky, trees, flowers, wind or waves, and it is often fleeting. It can also be permanent, such as in great works of art, architecture, or cultural creations from around the world.

I find many examples of beauty in the surrounding nature, like the monkeys that gather in my garden, or the kingfisher, with a blue plumage, waiting for a lone fish, and the peacocks, who run havoc near the airport, not letting Argus blink even once.

It’s hearing birds sing on a clear day. It’s seeing couples dance to their favorite songs. It’s seeing a bride and groom say I do on the altar. Beauty lies everywhere.

Jane Blanchard – Two Poems Eclipse You recognized another chance To witness quite a...

I am always in the process of creating beauty, delighting in beauty, and being beautiful.

Here’s what Emily says about capturing beauty: “The flash came, and I took a sheet of paper. . .and I wrote on it: I, Emily Byrd Starr, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame.”

Beauty is the long breath between seeing and coming to some sort of understanding, the tiny detail that attaches itself to your heart—the dance of honeybees, the slash of sunlight across a wooden floor, the invisible workings of the world.  Beauty is everywhere we dare to find it.

Flannery O’Connor had a penchant for the weird & the wild and a gift for finding beauty in both. After writing 101 poems in her voice, I have come to appreciate the strangeness she admired and become a convert to her brand of beauty. For what is symmetry, proportion, wholeness, and perfection—all classical ideals of beauty—set beside the homely, the lonely, the plain, and the maimed? 

Creating beauty requires identifying or forging connections that may be invisible or overlooked without the insights of the artist, the musician, or the writer.

Often what interests me in poetry are the nuances, the description of something that is not easily expressed in words but that you can recognize and feel in your gut. Poetry articulates the inexpressible.

Perhaps when it’s the stage of the process, or a particular object, that we take to be fundamentally beautiful, then momentarily we forget ourselves and the differences between us and the object, empirical or transcendent, that seem so transparent after the experience of beauty.

 I’ve had a strange relationship with beauty owning to a number of circumstances. I’ve coveted beauty. I’ve envied it, revered it, hated its tyranny, and worshipped its privileges.

Everything that exists has a unique mysterious element embedded within itself… The process of understanding the key ingredients of beautiful things comes from an obsession to create something similar. Long after admiration begins an abstract traverse of the mind. We first try breaking the crust of superficiality and then attempt to get beneath the intricate layers, all in the anticipation of touching the core of things that fascinate us.

Think of  discovering  how one object in  nature can shape-shift into the character of another person or thing, such as the silhouette of a tree (in the moonlight) that becomes a Hopi flute player, an old woman with a cane or whatever the mind allows itself to see; this is the beauty of  being aware, connecting the human soul to that of the natural world. 

Our human vocation is to notice and respond to beauty, to the Great Beauty, which both calls us home to itself and out again into the world which we are called to beautify in our particular ways.

At this point, I have to look for moments that seem beautiful, even if some of them feel sentimental or precious, because they may be the only bits of decency that are left to us.

We first try to understand others’ view of things and then find openings in them where our own ways of seeing can fit, creating in the observers the same stirrings that the thing of beauty had first inspired in us. 

Poetry has saved my life at least six times – and I do not mean metaphorically – I mean literally.  How beautiful and unlikely a truth is that?  And so I have a debt to pay to the art that has kept me alive.  That is almost more beautiful than I can express.

Beauty is found in synchronicity, in meaningful coincidences, in the similarity of patterns in feathers, snow flakes, ice crystals, whenever veined leaves and butterflies’ wings echo the lines inside our palm.

That moment of feeling or receiving compassion is what is most poignant and beautiful to me — the recognition of the other and the ephemerality of all things.

I raised my hand and asked, feeling I was probably revealing myself as a poetry-bumpkin, What about beauty? Everybody looked a little embarrassed. Didn’t I know the days of skylarks and cloudy climes were past?

A curtain of rain, days of sun and no rain, faces of children demanding change, egret plumes, bobcat’s tail, my daughter’s first laugh…

This fabric is beautiful—the way it weaves about, evolves, pervades all without a stitch, the way it disappears, dissipates, echoes, reduplicates, the way it sprinkles motifs, and speaks in the shapes and patterns of glossolalia.

Beloved, be my witness
today, i come to You
begging to be burnt until 
nothing remains but You

The ordinary is beautiful to me–domestic rituals in the home, a garden’s winter bones, sun on my granddaughters’ hair–where we live and breathe and grow. And at the core of the ordinary is the miraculous, if we pay close attention.

Everything we take into ourselves forms who we are in a continuous process of becoming. Maybe beauty reaches into everything, linking and making meaning in ways well beyond our awareness. Maybe it is hidden in stories, sights, and sensations we deem ugly or frightening because we aren’t tuned to beauty. Maybe finding beauty is a choice we learn to make.  

The possibility of beauty is often raised in small interactions between people – between neighbours, strangers, relatives – through intimacy, kindness, connection.

For every news story I read or phone call I make, I pad my core with a little more beauty. The trick to survival, now more than ever, is to hold onto music, color, art, and language. Beauty is not a luxury; it’s vital—it’s how we honor what’s important even as ugliness breaks out around us.

Someone is talking
about wine. It’s cool in here.
A little girl with a yellow balloon
and a shirt to match, a pink bow and an aqua
gauze skirt, reminds my friend
of her childhood.

Beauty comes to me, first and foremost, through my eyes.  The natural world serves as my most consistent doorway to it–whether through a mackerel sky at sunset, the geometry of garden flowers, striations in stones, the hover of raptors, the myriad shapes of insects, the wind swirling grass, or light playing on water.

In the presence of a masterful painting or a line of poetry whose words rise off their meaning, I’m inspired to feel, and perhaps express, what’s most true within me.

In a story written by the Yugoslav Nobel  prize laureate  Ivo Andric, an endless battle between beauty and evil in the world is presented through interesting metaphors. Beauty is seen as a young sheep, a talented dancer, and an old wolf symbolizes evil.  One day, wandering through the woods, the sheep named Aska finds herself before an old wolf. She dances on a meadow to save her life, and the old wolf stays enchanted by the beauty of the dance.

The world needs to refigure their ideas of perception and embrace the simplicity and glory of sunshine and its reflection over letters. Beauty is in places you need to transcend to look.

The poet’s job is to awaken the imagination
to open the door to the mind
that sets you on a journey

The writer can make the smallest, the insignificant beautiful. It can be said that beauty is the skeleton of beauty. The leaf falls without anyone noticing that the abyss is there.

I have no idea what beauty is or how it might be defined. But I am intrigued by what St. Augustine said about it: “Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.”

Beauty is resilience. It’s the revolution of the earth, the grace of the new year, the homecoming of an odyssey. It’s the edit after creation, the maturation of an idea. It’s the transformation of one thing into another, the refusal of matter to be destroyed. Beauty is a mutable moment and how we attempt, again and again, to convey it, no matter how vain the endeavor.

It was the beautifully unexpected, the shock of sudden music becoming a reality. This is what life should be filled with (although not filled too full, or its power will fade), and what all art secretly strives for, looks towards, and embodies.

What are the building blocks of the universe? Are they symmetrical, or chaotic? For how long can the material world last if it’s built with streams of chaotic particles? Why is the phi symbol so important to our world? Why do natural forms built with the golden mean incorporated into their structure seem generally pleasing to the human eye?

Beauty is getting out of bed every morning in a sun-speckled house smells of bacon, coffee that laces with whisky and a social strategy around my laptop that fends off a fur-shedding dog, busy-fingered children and a wryly pragmatic husband.

We are constantly surrounded by beauty. The challenge is not in finding beautiful objects and conditions. The challenge is in learning to see the beauty in various objects and conditions. It is all a matter of perspective. And this is why poets and artists bring value to our lives.

She said that Beauty “is everlasting/ and dust is for a time.” For me she is referring to the upper case Beauty and not that beauty chased daily by hordes of Americans. How I love Ms. Moore’s ability to cut through so much with so few words.