Category: Fiction

The bark of a birch, black lines on white with intricate texture and patterns. The canopy of the full-grown oak, leaves sparkling with movement, umbrella-like protection against the weather. The blood red of the fall leaves as the Japanese maple reveals its heart.

Beauty is the nightingale’s soft song that echoes as the dawn draws. Beauty is the power of love; a power so strong it may potentially bind two strangers til death do them part. But most importantly, beauty is the incredibly potential of humanity.

I experience beauty as resonance. Dictionaries define that term as a vibration, a quality of richness or variety, and a quality of evoking response. All three alert me to beauty.

He reached out with his cane and hooked a branch with roses and carefully pulled it towards him and leaned over and smelled its fragrance. He then gently put the branch back with his cane, turned back around and continued his walk.

Beauty? In the air I breathe during my daily walk, in words: “When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don’t frighten her. And when I see moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly, sweet cousin.” Mary Oliver, “Moss”. And “The sound of the ocean, the wind, your own heart.” Sylvie Germain, Magnus.