Category: Poetry

For the last 60 years I’ve been practicing the piano almost daily. I will never be a concert pianist, I no longer even accompany in church or community theatre. I simply sit down on the bench and begin again. What I’m really doing is practicing beauty: its creation, its presentation— in my own ears, if not in the rest of the world’s.

The kind of beauty we are talking about is not skin-deep or merely ornamental. It is the kind that not only draws our attention, but something so satisfying that we want more of. It is somewhat like love, something we know but is hard to explain. And like love it is authentic.

Our world in its essence is a transfiguration of beauty and all of us appreciating it. We can see the immense impact of the colors and perfumes on our daily life, and our existence is simply an incessant attempt to find beauty.

Beauty is a full moon over Lake Michigan, shrouded in smoky, backlit clouds and illuminating the rippled path of a sailboat. You can’t look away. It’s both exquisite and excruciating—causing the face to wince in the same way it would to express pain. And that’s what beauty is: pained gratitude for what can be endlessly contemplated yet never possessed. Even as it inflames our acquisitive, collector’s instincts, the beautiful eludes our grasp.

We have many more than the five senses we were taught about in school, and when these senses respond to beauty, a complex neuron dance is cued in our bodies. For me, beauty exists everywhere, and I feel the rhythm of that dance throughout each day, regardless of my mental or emotional state. I have to experience beauty to survive.