Beauty

 

 

Today I drove east on Highway 50, oversized sunglasses securely in place. They blocked my eyes more for fashion than function I observed, noting the billowy clouds covering the sun that provided the reality of the weatherman’s “mostly cloudy” predicted forecast. Speeding down the uneven concrete desperately needing roadwork, I pondered the weekend and continued on the caffeine-inspired high made feasible by my recent trip to Starbucks.

 

Amid other similarly addicted caffeine dependents, I sat and enjoyed the lazy Sunday afternoon with a friend. We talked life. We predicted the future. We analyzed the past. Reading the quotes emblazoned on the paper coffee cups provided by the beloved franchise, I found myself surprisingly inspired by the corporate attempt at inspiration.

 

Perhaps because it was not written by a celebrity or someone notable or notorious or even  widely acclaimed as brilliant. It was written by an everyday anyone who walks in the doors, smells the familiar coffee shop smell, considers the overpriced pastries and allows herself one on occasion because she did run the extra mile earlier that morning. This author pays double the value of a tall coffee with room for cream and justifies the excess through the atmosphere provided and community that ensues and resists a price tag.

 

Bless the humans who still love humanity. Embrace the imperfects who allow imperfections, the random ones who dwell in the chaos, the nomads who roam and call many places and no places home.

 

The wheels still spun in blurring succession below me and my trendy lenses stayed in place. Then I opened my already-open eyes and chose to not only see, but to care.

 

Life confronted me with its living, bursting with uncontrolled vibrancy. I almost wanted to maintain the dimmed tint and not recognize autumn’s final burst of life. It was too much. Extravagant excess. Yet simultaneously the urge came to smash the sunglasses to a broken and useless oblivion. I compromised and swept them atop my head and looked around. Nature’s kaleidoscope scattered its broken pieces, a rainbow mess in various stages of turning. The red glowed brightest, deep in its last stages of life. It shouted from the colorific din of the multitudes, “I am here for awhile and I am leaving.”

 

Silently it screamed, “Notice me. Remember.”

 

I remember now and will remember still, when the winter air hangs heavy and freezes cold, the life that sprang from the soon-to-be barren leaves.

 

Beauty is real.

 

Beauty is real and most beautiful in the unpredicted, unmaintained, unordered wildness of creation. I could not paint a scene this vivacious or describe it to even a fraction. It is here and I am with it. Now. This is my life and I live it. Now. The seasons pass and prowl, from one to the next, some with fanfare, some with resignation. 

 

Still in my car, sans sunglasses, I glance at the drivers who pass and peer at those whom I pass in civil disobedience of the speed limit. In this mixture of many, another gathering of beauty manifests: the messy mass of humanity. We travel past the trees exploding in color, some notice, others stare straight ahead. That natural beauty arrives and departs in seasonal transition, but those who pass by it remain.

 

 

What would it take to notice each other and acknowledge the expansive beauty given to us by a unique creator?  The passionate reds of talent and the subtle blues of imperfection?  The complete and the incomplete?  The obviously worthy and the variations of more hidden value? What would it take to remove the sunglasses of convenience and anonymity and see imperfections as something to be noticed and something to be allowed?

 

 

What would it take for us to allow beauty to be flawed and not the composite of many perfect parts? What would it take for us to give one another our humanity? 

 

© 2006

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