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To Behold the Beauty

As far back as I can remember, I have loved the beautiful and despised the ugly.  The truly ugly, not the “beautiful in the eyes of the beholder” type of stuff, but the bottom-of-the-barrel grotesque.  However, this post is not about the ugly.  It’s about the beautiful!

A clear night sky: Crushed velvet that the stars twinkle from like so many diamonds in a jeweler’s display.  The fiery dance of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a blazing tumult over the sleeping town.  A cloth draped over a dome, with pin pricks illuminated by the glory beyond.

North Coast Redwoods: The soft sound of moss and damp earth underfoot.  Light filtering through a thousand green branches, bathing everything emerald.  The scent of a millennium years of death and rebirth, one never present without the other.

Waterfalls: The continuous cascade of silver pouring over the wet-blackened rocks.  Ferns clinging bravely between the stones.  The foaming torrents into a calm, cool pool beneath.

I love them!  I love stars and redwoods and waterfalls and flowers and chubby baby cheeks and color and movement and light.  Something inside me responds to these things with a feeling akin to pain, the piercing desire of my soul to break free from mortal confines and soar into the embrace of everything lovely.  This pain that causes my eyes to tear up with the sheer, overwhelming joy of the transcendentally beautiful.   


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