I wonder what beauty is. I have been seeing lovely things all my life, but they never moved me, never presented themselves so poignantly as they have done since I entered into adversity. Now beauty appears as something more than itself. It seems to me a gateway into God. the thrilling, moving, tremendous thing about it is not the especial aspect under which it appears, not the tree, the flower the bird note at dusk, but the occasional sense of otherwhereness, of something more, a marvelous Something — complete ecstasy — that beauty half reveals... It is this overpowering Something, hidden in the midst of beauty, that moves one so exquisitely, tears the heart out, almost terrifies at times by its nearness — "Oh Ecstasy behind the grass, come softly when Thou comest nigh!"
The discovery that God is as close to us as water in a sponge, or that God is in our body's veins and arteries as well as in the veins and arteries of our lives, is the fundamental music accompanying the entire dance of the spirit... Through every movement and every gestures, every turn and return, every leap forward and every silent rest, the music remains -- not only beneath and over and under and next to and within. In the trees and in the lakes, in the laughter and in the tears, in the animals and in the sun, in the soil, the fire, the air, the water. In the lure and the invitation ... the responding, the searching, the finding, the remembering. And in every one of us.