On the horizon, just over the tops of the yellow, red, and orange autumn woods, the clouds pile up slowly into the sky. It’s as if you were seeing these things for the first time.

Beauty is the lever which moves the soul — to action or reflection, to laughter or to tears, to passion or compassion, in company or in solitude.

I fall in love with the art of writing poetry over and over again.

1963.
The year some French
Took too literally
Baudlaire,
And his poem, “The Cat”:

Félicette
Body electric,
Name ironic.
With ceremony,
Flung into space.

beauty is profane. 
bursting through, it serves no other, vital for itself. and self as whole, and wholly beautiful. rough and wild, tender, true.

Tresha Faye Haefner – Four Poems How to Deal with Mortality All your life you have wanted a...

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?