spring

Our relationship to time has become corrupted because we allow ourselves very little experience of the TIMEless. We speak continuously of SAVING time, but time in it richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. We speak of STEALING time as if it no longer belonged to us We speak of NEEDING time as if it wasn't around us already in every moment. We want to MAKE time for ourselves as if it were in our power to o so. Time is the conversation with absence and visitation, the frontier between ourselves and those we love; the hours become ripe with happening only when we are attentive, patient, and present. 

The garden was a splendid sight, rich with life and glowing with color and greenery in the desert heat. I heard bluejays squawking and sparrows chirping near our rooftop, gazed at the white butterflies dancing amid the tomato plants pregnant with fruit, and I took a deep breath, longing to capture forever the magical moment in my mind's eye. Such beauty, such peace, I thought, right here in my own backyard.

The beauty of the world is the co-operation of divine wisdom in creation. All love of universal beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the universe.

Spirit cuts like water though it all
Carving out this emptiness
So inner eye can see
The soaring height of canyon walls within
Walls whose very color, texture, form
Redeem in beauty all my life has been
The darkness and the light, the false, the true
While deep below through my parts
To resurrect my gravebound heart
Making, always making, all things new.

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!"

Love the beautiful in everything; it is a ray of light divine. It is love's beauty. The beautiful thrills us into a kind of ecstasy, suspending the din of our inward activity in the silence of admiration; and admiration gives our nature a kind of fulfillment, a restful satiety asking for nothing more. It is the very essence of contemplative adoration.

The night is beautiful
So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful
So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

The beauty consists of purity of heart.