“The coolness of a water-lily rounding into bloom is different from the coolness of an evening wind in summer, and different again from the coolness of the rain that soaks into the hearts of growing things and gives them life and body. The velvet of a rose is not that of a ripe peach or of a baby’s dimpled cheek. The hardness of a rock is to the hardness of wood what a man’s deep bass is to a woman’s voice when it is low. What I call beauty I find in certain combinations of all these qualities, and is largely derived from the flow of curved and straight lines which is all over things” —Helen Keller
Beauty comes to me as easily as opening my eyes. It almost feels like I’m cheating. There is no effort in my appreciation of beauty. I see something, and I either find it beautiful or I don’t. There’s no conscious effort in the decision of beauty. This breeds the question: does there need to be effort in finding something beautiful? Is my idea of beauty less legitimate because I don’t have to reach out and touch something—because there is little effort in my observation of the universe?
I'd like to think that maybe with some effort, I can find everything beautiful. Even a worm, as gross as it may seem at first, can still be beautiful. It lives in the earth and eats the dirt to make food for plants and trees that I find beautiful immediately. I have to just try and be mindful, and not take anything for face value, I guess?
Worms can be wonderful, forking as they move through soil; their ways of mitigation, tend, I think p, to fork --and that interaction with soil, and air, and elements in dirt is do beaitiful, I think --some ways of beauty in systems, beauty of how things work --I love this, as mt thoughts become forms of worms, navigating my brain, and dirt there.... More later.
ReplyDeleteLove Helen Keller also, her tactile dyed teems of knowing worlds -- hoe do you imagine that the sensory impaired get a sense of more distant space? --and learn to appreciate that earth itself is a celestial object in space?
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