Beauty is Everywhere

There is a Navajo prayer that I read once that best describes my feelings on beauty. Currenty I can't find the book I read it in even though I know I own it, but here is the closest I found to it online.

On the trail of beauty, there I wander
In the house of happiness, there I wander
Beauty before me, there I wander
Beauty behind me, there I wander
Beauty above me, there I wander
Beauty below me, there I wander
All around me, in old age traveling
On the trail of beauty, with beauty I wander
With beauty I wander.

Many people seem to wander through their lives and forget to stop to see the beauty that is surrounding them the whole time. We get busy with work, kids, spouses, family, friends, errands, all the things that we need to get done. Then at the end of the day we are tired. Mean while we miss the settle beauty of a cloud in the sky or the small flower on the ground that we passed on our way to the mailbox. We miss the beauty in a spider and its web. The beauty of the designs in a rock that was laying on the ground. We even miss the beauty in the situations we find ourselves in throughout our lifes.

When things are going wrong in our life all we see is the ugliness of the moment. How often have you stopped to see what good might come from those problems? Do you see the things you learned from those situations? Have you thought about how many other people might be able to benefit from the knowledge you found? Sometimes we aren't able to see these things for until the hard times have passed and that is alright.  The point is if you look hard enough you can find something beautiful in it. Sometimes you might need to use that pain or that hard time to help another in order to make it a beautiful moment. It might even be the fact that someone stopped for a moment to help you that made it beautiful. Maybe some how that moment years later lead you down a path that you might not have gone down originally, but that path brought you to something beautiful. Maybe you met the love of your life due to one moment of hard times you ended up moving or you ended up at a job that later lead you to the place you met them at. Maybe that heartbreak you had when you were younger opened you up to be availabe for that love of your life. That heartbreak may have even prepared you to know when you found the person you love and made you appreciate them that much more. There is beauty in every situation. Beauty isn't just in the good times.

Here is another thought for you to ponder. When everything is going wrong do you ever stop for  just a moment take a deep breath and try to remember the things that are going right? Such things as having a loved one who is there by your side and is helping you through those hard times. Your child who may not realize Mom or Dad is struggling with paying the bills, but still looks at you with those loving eyes and admiration. The child who just wants to see you smile and so crawls in your lap to give you a hug. The friends who through everything still are there with an encouraging word to remind you that your not alone even if you feel like you are. Or how about the friends that take a dark moment and turn it around to be something outrageous and funny. Sometimes we need to just stop and look around us to see the beauty that surrounds us. It is there all the time. We just need to open our hearts and eyes to see it.

As there is beauty in all that we do the good and the bad there is also beauty in our surroundings. Have you ever looked at a photograph, a work of art, heard a song, or read words and wondered how do they see all that? The answer is they were looking for it. They kept their eyes and hearts open for the beauty of inspiration. One of my hobbies is photography. I am not going to say I am good at it, but I enjoy trying to find new ways to take pictures of things. So this hobby has lead me to read articles here and there and pick up books and magazines on photography. One of my favorites being Arizona Highways. The photographs in there are beyond beautiful and they mix their articles with stories behind the pictures along with what the photographer was thinking when they took the picture. If you ever read articles or interviews with artists of any sort where they discribe what they were thinking when they created a masterpiece you will find most of the time they were just struck with the beauty they saw and had to capture it. This amazes me. Especially as I started looking at more and more photography. One of the things I found most photographers end up learning at some point (especially nature or landscape photographers) is to look closer at things. Don't just look at the big picture, but start looking inside the big picture. In the recent issue of Arizona Highways one of my favorite pictures is a close shot of a drop of dew that is just barely hanging off of a flower. The amazing part of this picture is that if you look inside the drop of dew you can see a full picture of a neighboring flower. My point about this is what would have happened if this photographer hadn't stopped to see that drop of dew and decided to take a close up picture of it. That beautiful moment would have been missed and wouldn't have become a beautiful picture. It is due to such thoughts as this that has caused me to try to remember to look around me at the big pictures and the small ones as I go through my life looking for the beauty that an artist may see. Try it tomorrow. Look around you. Look in front of you. Look to each side. Look above you. Even look below you and see what beauty you may find. I would love to hear what you see.

Another thought came to me when I was discribing the picture of the dew hanging off the flower. The picture of the dew is similar to our lives. The drop of dew is our lives so small that sometimes we don't see the larger more beautiful picture within it. That beautiful picture is you.