Look For the Beauty

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."  - Confucius

In the old  Tom Hanks movie, Joe and the Volcano, the opening scene is one of drab gray misery......people walking into the factory, broken, colorless, .....and there is a small yellow flower that is peeking up through a crack in the old broken sidewalk.......and someone steps on  the flower.   All around there was starkness,  and the obvious point of beauty.....is trampled.  No one saw it.

Life gets that way sometimes,  filled with despair, and sadness and hopelessness, we forget to look for beauty.  And regardless of the circumstances........there is always beauty.  One of the most touching stories I ever read was about a war torn area, there was destruction everywhere, very few of the townspeople were left, mostly women and children.....they were cold and hungry.  When spring came, there was a single cherry tree that blossomed, and it was filled with fruit.  I will never forget about the survivors of that village, how they described the beauty of that tree and its fruit, and how those were the best cherries they had ever eaten.  They saw the beauty.

Everyday, I remind myself to look for the beauty......it is still here, though in this election year, it seems sometimes to have vanished.  Everything does have beauty, after the tornadoes struck our state last year, we saw some of the most bizarre beautiful things.......twisted trees and metal,  glorious blue skies, strange abstract piles of debris.  There is beauty in the old, the unique, the disfigured.....there is beauty in the barren, the disarrayed, and the chaotic.  Everything does have beauty, and yes, you have to look for it.  On the way to my mother's funeral, I realized that fall had come, and the color of the leaves was dazzling.  There was beauty, even in grief.

Tomorrow, look for the beauty.