Look for the beauty

See only beauty; feel only love. - James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

There's a prayer that goes something like this: beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to either side of me, beauty above and beauty below; I walk in beauty.

I think that is less a prayer for the blessing of beauty surrounding us, than it is a recognition of truth. The tricky part is recognizing it.

It's easy to lose sight of the beauty in our daily rush, but even easier to find it when we pause for a moment and look for it. Not just the beauty of natural spaces, although I think that is the first thing that comes to mind for most of us (the color of flowers, a flower growing in an unexpected place, the flight of a hawk, the pair of sandhill cranes feeding next to the road), but we can also find it in the human-created world around us: the art of a pencil, pen or paintbrush; the lines of a well-designed building. We, especially, can find it in the faces around us. In the lines that speak to experience, in the open joy of a child.

Beauty all around.