What a Beautiful World!

Do you ever take a walk outside and think about the beauty all around you? Since I became a photographer I spend my days looking for and seeing beauty almost everywhere I go. For me, picking up a camera and looking at the world through its viewfinder is a recipe for seeing beauty. My heart sings and I want to shout

I never expected that becoming a photographer would change the way I see the world. But it did! Now I look closely at everything around me and I see grace, color, light, symmetry, and more. My walks have become rambles with frequent stops and interruptions to look more closely at something along the path. I look up, down, and all around. My husband says that taking a walk with me when I have my camera along is not a walk, it’s a series of stops and pauses with a few steps in between. Usually when we go for a walk together now, I leave my camera behind so that we can really walk together.

Today, like every other day,
we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

—Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing, by Jalal al-Din Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks.

Earlier this week I went out to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum thinking that I was looking for signs of spring (which I did find). But partway through my wanderings I realized that I was really simply

Looking for Beauty

in the natural world around me.

I do best on my photographic ramblings when I am all alone. Somehow walking with someone often distracts me from being in the present moment and seeing deeply. But I also enjoy taking walks with friends. It’s just a different kind of walk than when I am alone with my camera.

Even dead hosta leaves looked beautiful to me on my walk at the Arboretum this week. Look at the grace of the leaves, the textures, patterns, subtle colors.

We have often heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is usually taken to mean that the sense of beauty is utterly subjective; there is no accounting for taste because each person’s taste is different. The statement has another, more subtle meaning: if our style of looking become beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us. We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger. The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything. When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.
― John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

I also found signs of spring — azalea leaves and buds, fuzzy magnolia flower buds, maple tree blooms, and more. Though the weather today has taken a colder turn, spring will be bursting into bloom before we know it.