Hope Mosaic

That middle photo says it all: hope. Sometimes it’s hard to find when looking at the world around us, and even harder to hold onto once it’s found … but if you look hard enough, it’s there. Always has been and always will be.

My thanks to the Flickr members who supplied the photos: 1. Brewer’s Black Bird, 2. Hidden, 3. “The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”, 4. ~ You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away (Thank You, Paul McCartney, John Lennon & Eddie Vedder), 5. {we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars}, 6. hard worker, 7. flower black and white, 8. Natural Bridges Sunset, Black and White – Santa Cruz, California, 9. hidden

Storm Sunset

A few days ago a small thunderstorm swept through the area to my West and put on quite a show. I enjoy non-destructive thunderstorms – have since I was a kid – and seeing them from a couple miles away allows for some fantastic viewing. Feeding off the late afternoon heat, the storm boiled into the sky and passed near enough to drive me indoors with rain. With sunset in full gear and the rain easing off, I walked to a small clearing near the house and watched as the storm tracked neatly to the South leaving a perfectly clear sky behind.

I should have taken my camera, but once the show got started I wasn’t about to leave. Nature offers few intermissions. As the sun slid over the horizon of trees and hills to the West and the thunderstorm edged away South, rays of light caught the upper portions of the stormclouds and painted them gold. The lower clouds faded from orange and red to maroon and gray with a beauty and sublety that fixed me in place. Occasional flickers of lightning brightened the main cloud column. Evening mist – steam – filled the rambling valley I overlooked and a crescent moon finished the masterpiece of land and sky in a bright sliver against the deepening blues of coming night. Only a madman would have left to fetch a camera.

It would have been beautiful on film, no doubt, a stunning photo of summer evening, but paper and pixels could never do it justice. There are some things that eyes need to see for themselves, that hands need to feel and lungs need breathe. How do you accurately describe the taste of a ripe peach? Words, visuals, images only go so far.

So I stood in rain-peppered awe following the storm’s southerly push and the sun’s splendid farewell until color had faded from the uppermost tip of the anvil cloud and the moon ruled the dark sky. It was so beautiful. At times like that I feel filled with child-like wonder, as if some part of the world were suddenly new again and I got to experience it first-hand.

I suppose in a way it was. Every day is new. Every living thing grows and changes. Non-living things are acted upon and altered. It is an ever-shifting world so, yes, I suppose every thing is always just a little bit new.

I find that unspeakably encouraging.

Technicolor Life

My favorite color is blue. It has been for many many years. But I find that the older I get, the harder it is to pick just one; all colors are beautiful. I never liked chartreuse until I noticed that sunlight in fresh spring grass carried that color. Gray never seemed exciting until I saw it churning in the sky and ocean after a storm. I was never very fond of pink until those tiny, delicate crocuses bloomed in front of the house, and the rose bush shed great handfuls of bright pink petals on the sidewalk.

Somewhere, everything is beautiful. Maybe not in the same place or at the same time as anything else, but every thing has its own beauty. I may not enjoy a wine-colored shirt, but wine-colored autumn leaves or wine edging on green ivy is a different story.

Years ago a close friend and published poet urged me to write a poem about color (I fancied I had a bit of talent back then). There were rules, of course, to make the process more interesting, including that the entire poem could contain only one basic color and anything mentioned must pertain to it. To really challenge myself (cocky as I was) I chose what I thought was the most boring color in the crayon box (brown) and spent several days refining my little creative attempt. The results were hardly better than mediocre but it changed my perspective completely. In looking for “brown” things worth writing about, I found unexpected beauty everywhere.

I’ve never stopped looking for similar unexpected beauties, and have never stopped finding them.