Beauty is a wordless sermon on the mystery of the Divine Presence in our world. The appearance of beauty and our ability to receive it is a revelation of God in our lives. Beauty is one of the faces of God.
Unless we are rooted in God, and rooted in the only sure way of listening to God -- namely, silence -- then we are doomed to spend our lives standing at the window of life and watching the world go by... It strikes me that most of the first part of our lives is spent filling our heads with information. The last part -- and the most important part -- is spent emptying our heads of all the trivia so that our hearts may be free to learn wisdom -- in silence.