Beauty

Today is nice. I have no schedule and the duskiness of impending rain allows me to ignore the chores of yard work and gardening. I can sit uncombed with my coffee and computer without compunction. Amazing prospects of reading or wording or snoozing, whatever I wish. I haven’t encountered such a day stretching before me in over a fortnight. Yet, I shall make lists and blog while the quiet cradles. Thought and plan can meander along collecting this idea or discarding that problem. It’s a sorting kind of day.

While I was savoring these ideas, I noticed a bit of poetry from my Bible laying open under my journal.

Of the wood of Lebanon

Solomon the King

Made himself a palanquin:

He made its pillars of silver,

Its supports of gold,

Its seat of purple,

Its interior paved with love

By the daughters of Jerusalem.

To the pragmatic person, these words could seems like so much nonsense. Who wants to be carried around in a glitzy, glamorous litter like a King? Seriously? But wait, why not let poetry be, for the intention of beauty and musing? The word pillar is splendid, as well as gold and silver and purple. I am entranced by the sparkle and gleam just reading them. The line “paved with love” holds my attention the longest. How? How can something be paved with love? Poetry provides idea in ways that no other arrangement of words can. Poetry lets one leap over the wall and walk in the meadow, exploring the otherwise unseen and unnoticed.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is true. Because whereas I can readily give assent to our farmer daughters gloating over a basket of blue, green, and brown spotted chicken eggs, or my husband noticing a recently logged property; I see the blue of the water behind the white of a sail and the reflections thereof on the dancing water.

Maybe we should practice seeing beauty. Those who have peace of mind and heart see best. Pride and cynicism dim the perception of true beauty. Having trouble seeing? Check your heart. Maybe some love pavement would help you.