intangibilities : beauty

people need beauty in their lives. 

{written at 8:42 am}

early this morning i headed to work, surprisingly on time. when i rounded my very favorite bend of the neighborhood looking over the city, my breath was literally taken away. for some reason, today it was more beautiful and ethereal than i've seen in quite some time. it looked completely unreal. the view that i saw would have been obscured if one were already below in the city. because i was on a hill, my vision was perfect. metaphor? possibly. i slowed the car and pulled on the side of the road to watch.

i turned off the radio and listened to the silence. i couldn't stay long, and i had no camera. however, photographer as i am, i was almost glad that i had no way to record it this time. it forced me to just stare upward, appreciate, soak in the real thing -- not just the record of it -- more fully.

{when i first started photography, i had this hunger to record absolutely everything. as the files started piling up and the anxiety of getting them all edited/facebooked/sent/whatever, i decided to take less photos and started to just...feel...more. today was one of those days.}

i wished i had someone there with me to share the view, anyone-- but alone in my car, i did not.

then i realized i had someone there: i prayed. thanked God for just about everything in my vision. just that act, coupled with the pure, untouched beauty before me was a really fascinating experience. i was surprised about how much i was truly and genuinely grateful for right at that moment -- those intangible three minutes of time.

...

i drove to work and parked. i work on campus; i have to climb a hill to reach my building. as i climbed, i kept looking up. though at first my vision was obscured, the more i climbed the more i saw. finally, i stopped and looked around -- there it was: the beauty. the view was different; the perspective had changed. i had to adjust my position to see the same mountains as i had before, but beauty is fleeting; it wasn't as glorious as before. but still pretty breathtaking. made me glad i'd seen what i had from where i was before--it made me more fully appreciate what i saw now.

i had to keep going-- work was my destination. i kept climbing. right before i walked into the building, i took one last look up and could see, almost hidden by foreground trees-- those mountains. the beauty.

metaphor time! this post is just a literal record of the thoughts and how they formulated i my head this morning. concluding with the quite obvious and perhaps all-too-overused metaphor. i'll keep it short and let you fill in the rest:

sometimes it's hard to see the beauty in life. we focus on our worries, concerns, tasks, goals, day-to-day activities, people...at times, we just have to. but remember, beauty is fleeting. how will we see it if we aren't looking heavenward...?