Look for Beauty

Beauty 0

Try to practice enjoying and seeing the beauty in the things that are around you. Practice doing it for a few minutes at a time until you get into the habit of it. Take a walk, for example — it could be in a busy built-up city. Take the time to notice what is around you. There is always beauty around us. We just don’t always notice it, and we frequently don’t think it is important. It’s the little bits of beauty around us that help to teach us to appreciate life. Take a look around, and I know you will see something of beauty. It may be a bird, a plant in a pot, a building, a child with a smile, or something in a window. There is always something of beauty around us.

In seeing beauty around you, you will appreciate life more, and recognize more the beauty that is within yourself. Appreciating beauty helps you to slow down, and the more beauty you notice, the more beauty you will see. Much of the time we just don’t notice what is around us. We are lost in our thoughts or fail to give any importance or value to the idea of seeing beauty.

— Lorna Byrne, A Message of Hope from the Angels, p. 91

Better in Small Ways

Beauty, Compassion, Connection, Core Value, Life 0

If you focus continually on making the world a better place in some small way by improving, appreciating, connecting, and protecting, you’ll develop conviction, stand for something, and model those things for other people. In a small way, you’ll make the world a better place. You and those you love will be happier, your life will have more meaning and purpose, and you’ll create a legacy that will give you peace in your later years.

— Steven Stosny, Soar Above, p. 165

In the Company of Artists

Beauty, Writing 0

When I look back on [my] decade of total failure – it’s been a mixture, both before, and since – there was, even on the days of rejection slips, a tiny, stubborn refusal to be completely put down. And I think, too, and possibly most important, that there is a faith simply in the validity of art; when we talk about ourselves as being part of the company of such people as Mozart or van Gogh or Dostoyevsky, it has nothing to do with comparisons, or pitting talent against talent; it has everything to do with a way of looking at the universe. My husband said, “But people might think you’re putting yourself alongside Dostoyevsky.” The idea is so impossible that I can only laugh in incredulity. Dostoyevsky is a giant; I look up to him; I sit at his feet; perhaps I will be able to learn something from him. But we do face the same direction, no matter how giant his stride, how small mine.

— Madeleine L’Engle, Circle of Quiet, quoted in Madeleine L’Engle, Herself, p. 32

Beautiful Cracks

Beauty, Healing 0

One has to be done with the pretense of being just fine, unscarred, perfectly self-sufficient. No one is.

The ancient Chinese had a practice of embellishing the cracked parts of valued possessions with gold leaf, which says: We dishonor it if we pretend that it hadn’t gotten broken. It says: We value this enough to repair it. So it is not denial or a cover-up. It is the opposite, an adornment of the break with gold leaf, which draws the cracks into greater prominence. The gold leaf becomes part of its beauty. Somehow the aesthetic of its having been cracked but still being here, brought back not to baseline but restored, brings increase.

— Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway, p. 50

Deepest Wounds

Beauty, Healing, Trials 0

Maybe you can live a full and beautiful life in spite of the great and terrible moments that will happen right inside of you. Actually — maybe you get to become more abundant because of those moments. Maybe — I don’t know how, but somehow? — maybe our hearts are made to be broken. Broken open. Broken free. Maybe the deepest wounds birth deepest wisdom.

— Ann Voskamp, The Broken Way, p. 24

A Bit of Love Frozen

Beauty, God 0

Everything beautiful is a bit of love frozen: the love that gives is to the gift as water is to ice. Ah, you should hear our torrent shout in the spring! The thought of God fills me so full of life, that I want to go and do something for everybody.

— George MacDonald, Warlock O’Glenwarlock, chapter 22, quoted in Discovering the Character of God, edited by Michael Phillips, p. 230.