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.