What Are You Looking At?

Watercolor sketch of Bellingham Bay

"No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty.  Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening---still all is Beauty!"

---John Muir.

What we are looking at in our day-to-day routine impacts our outlook and our daily accomplishments.  With the digital world being so interwoven into our moments, what we choose to focus on in the moments adds up to an overall diminishing or enriching of our souls.  The word 'diminish' comes from the Old French for "to make small" and the Latin for "to break into small pieces".  Does your day feel fragmented and incoherent at times?  Or is there an overarching theme that can pull the moments together and make meaning out of them?  Are you purposing to find Beauty in your day?  

Around some canyons near Scottsbluff, Nebraska

Looking out the window, stepping outside for a breath of fresh air, going for a walk, or sitting and gazing out across the horizon can be so renewing.  Doing this gives you a better sense of perspective on your daily life.  It also gives you an awareness of something larger than yourself.  And it makes you sense a "beyondness" of things, that there is something more to this life than just your little spot in this world.  John Barry, the great film composer tried to capture that in his composition titled "The Beyondness of Things":

With all the dark and foreboding news of war, corruption, and terror in our world, seeing beauty brings hope and sanity to our lives.  But more than seeing it, what we really desire is to be a part of it....as C.S. Lewis so ably describes it in his essay The Weight of Glory: 

"We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough.  We want something else which can hardly be put into words---to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it....At present we are on the wrong side of the door.  We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure.  We cannot mingle with the splendours we see.  But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so.  Some day, God willing, we shall get in."

Live bravely and beautifully!