Beauty

I never want to forget about beauty.

I never want to forget about light- any kind of light… the way it gleams through cracks in doorways and glistens through the blinds. Colours dancing on the walls, and soft and peaceful shades. I don’t want complacency to keep me seated and sure in things in which I have found nothing before.

Even when joy flickers on my eyelids, I blink and only darkness. Only for a second. But I let the evil enter. I listen. I let it shade my solitude, allow it access to my thoughts. I want to control or to ignore it. Control is fleeting, because I cannot attain it, though I try with endless run-throughs and sickly waves of guilt. Ignorance is no better, for it smothers my joy, holds her back just a little. It puts restrictions on my freedom, imposes limits on my peace.

This is not the life I want. This is not the choice I want to make.

I never want to forget about beauty. I want to remember it. I want to feel it: around me, above me, within me. It has been all those places all along. It is my choice to be beautiful… to allow my life to be beautiful. To lend even light to darkness so that nothing is not filled with peace.

I was thinking about this today as I stood by the sink in the kitchen. Outside, through the small window before me, I saw rain falling softly to the pavement below. A dismal, dark, dreary, rain-splattered parking lot. Yet for a moment, I saw something more. I was struck with the beauty of the ordinary scene: how the street light hit the slick pavement so that rain sparkled in its glow. How beyond the parking lot there were trees… trees that framed the rich blue sky with might and grace. The snow shone against the evening air, and past the trees I saw a house with distant warmth in its windows.

So maybe there is  beauty everywhere, among other things, and simply more than one way to look at what we find around us. Amidst the weight of our circumstances, it is hard to detach ourselves from the “feelings” produced by our current situations. But I am imagining how much more beautiful my life could be if I spent more time looking for the beauty in everything in it: for beauty in places, beauty in other people and beauty in myself.