I will start with this. There are days when it seems impossible to focus on beautiful things. Or heartless, maybe. What kind of denial is that, to hide yourself in prettiness when you know what you know about this world? And yet those are the days I most need to hide. My only thought is that maybe it's not always denial. Maybe sometimes it's more like the opposite, when you agree to hold the hard things in one hand, and the beautiful in the other and refuse—refuse—to deny either one.
I know I will keep hiding myself in what is good. I want to rest there, draw strength, share what I find with others—not in denial of what's hard, but in spite of it.
Here’s one place I hid today:
Not in the actual place, but in the memory of it. By now everything in this picture is older, more uniform, less delicate. But the picture remains. The day I took it, the scene took my breath away. Green—all the many shades of it—takes my breath away. New glowing chartreuse, translucent lime green, fresh grass green, still water green, shadowy woods green, emerald leaves against a blue sky green. The variations are unending. Spring green isn’t a single color from the Crayola box, it is its own whole spectrum. Delicate, but vast.
Over and over I find myself drawn to what is delicate.
“Delicate [del’i-kat] adj fine in texture; fragile, not robust; requiring tactful handling; of exquisite workmanship; requiring skill in techniques.”
But here is what strikes me: something that grabs me, takes my breath away, changes for a moment how I see the world—what do you see in that?
I see power. Fragility and beauty and something-beyond-grasp that somehow equal power. The kind that surprises, sustains, holds the whole world together. This is where I want to stay.
