Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Give beauty away

Each morning, when I look through my images from Fort Worth, this photo stops me in my tracks.  I love it: love the mix of patterns, the colors, the balance, the perspective, the reflective surfaces -- everything about it.

But it doesn't tell a story.  Which doesn't make it a bad image, but it does make it challenging to say anything about it.  Beauty alone, I keep thinking, is just not enough.  But then, this morning, I realized it can be: I remembered this quote from Joan Chittister, in her book The Illuminated Life: 

Beauty magnetizes the contemplative," she says,"and it is the duty of the contemplative to give beauty away so that the rest of the world may, in the midst of squalor, ugliness, and pain, remember that beauty is possible... 

"An encounter with the beautiful lifts our eyes beyond the commonplace and gives us a reason for going on...  In the midst of struggle, in the depths of darkness, in the throes of ugliness, beauty brings with it a realization that the best in life is, whatever the cost, really possible... 

"To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give it away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God ."

And so I post this here, because its beauty -- like the works of art in the museum whose door is its subject -- feeds my eyes and soul. I'm hoping it might feed yours as well...

3 comments:

Louise Gallagher said...

It does -- and it makes me think of space travel somehow...

Diane Walker said...

Hmm. Wonder if the Star Trek geeks in the family are wearing off on me!

Patricia Turner said...

This reminds me of an ancient Chinese proverb:
"If you have two pennies spend one on bread and one on flowers. The bread will give you life, the flowers a reason for living."

Thank you for your lovely posts.