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.