As a 5-year-old, I plucked a flower, delighted by its glowing yellow and white leaves and sweet scent -- it's very life -- and raced inside from the backyard to the kitchen, where I proudly presented it to my mother.It just seemed right to present that flower, that fragile discovery of beauty, to the most loving and most beautiful person I had known in my then short life. (That an Orb-weaver spider dangled from it's stem was a development Mom handled with aplomb, and a quick shake of mycgft outside the back door).
Throughout my ensuing years as a child, teen and young man, I courted beauty and wonder by playing and later backpacking amid the creeks, brooks and rivers of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho's mountain meadows, forests, and wilderness expanses.
The vibrant cycles of life in nature -- its unfathomable (to me, anyway) variety in living art, form, purpose and even the very fact of such intricate existence -- filled me with peace and a sense of belonging to something inconceivably bigger than me.
Now, six weeks out from my 67th ride on Earth's circuit of Old Sol, I'm finally learning that every day spent in beauty -- where sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste cascade in sum to inform and overwhelms a sixth sense of wonder -- brings contemplation, meditation, prayer and grateful worship of the Creator of it, and us all.
This is my purpose in life. Maybe yours, too?
As an Orthodox Christian, I celebrate finding such observations are many in my faith's two millennia of saintly sages' visionary revelations, hymns and prayers. These works of theirs still echo those sentiments of wonder and gratitude today, with wisdom, awe, and love deeper and purer as both personal, and metaphysical prose and poetry that I cannot approach.
Still, to taste and express even something of the same epiphanies? And to share them? Personally priceless.
This is the time of Covid-19 and self-isolation, but if we will accept it, also the opportunity for stretching perception to discover the universe contained in a flower, bird, insect, or the way water falls over a mountain stream's rocks -- or on the face of a child, parent, a passing stranger, and yes, even in the heart belonging to that person in the mirror.
I know that beauty in nature, the cosmos, and the potential for growing it within as we see it cultivated and present in others, is a Truth that finds expression beyond Orthodox Christianity. Indeed, to varying degrees, it reverberates in myriad other religions and philosophies that seemingly draw on a primordial concept of humankind.
One of many such examples: "Beauty in front of me, Beauty behind me, Beauty above me, Beauty below me, Beauty all around me, I walk in Beauty," the Diné (Navajo) elders have prayed from pre-historic times.
While appreciating and treasuring such universal expression of seminal truths, personally, I find them most fully and clearly conveyed within my own faith.
"In Him we live, and breathe, and have our being," St. Paul wrote (Acts 17:28). "O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, Who are everywhere present and fillest all things," Orthodox Christians intone, echoing the apostle in the daily Trisagion prayers.
But wherever you are in matters of faith, refocusing your gaze from our failed, manufactured "reality" of ego, entertainment, work, etc., to what exists independently of all that -- both around us, and within us -- is what our current crisis offers each of us.
And that is too good to pass up.
