Beauty: Stop and Look “Into”

The robin sings cheerily from atop my roof. His rusty red breast heaves as his throat swells, and the music he makes is like water chirping over stones in an early spring creek. In the background the white clouds are piled up like mountains against the blue sky. Dusk harkens. But for a moment I can pretend time isn’t slipping away and I have eternity to stand, and breathe and listen.

The earth turns and the clouds take on an amber hue. I think about my favorite recurring dream. I am flying through pink clouds and they are actually cotton candy. I can tasty their tangy sweetness as I soar through them. Alas, tonight I can only watch with my feet planted on the ground since gravity has yet to make an exception for me.

I stand and consider the seemingly meaningless details that make up my frazzled life. I crawl into bed every night–exhausted–and pray that tomorrow will find me rested and ready for the day. But the frenzy of activities that must happen before 7:00am often make me feel like I’ll never catch up on that rest I am always chasing. I seem to spend my minutes hurrying from one task to the next but never feeling satisfied in the work I have done. I exercise so that I will chase the clouds from my brain and the fat from my belly but they are still there. I zip to work through traffic and to a job where I rush from one task to the next in a flurry of anxiety–fearful that I may miss a detail that will cause the people I work with to be frustrated with me. This constant pressure–the terror that I’m not doing something right–has taken it’s toll. The tired feeling lingers, and–like a wool sweater can suffocate when the temperature rises–I’m smothering.

I was recently reading a blog about patience. I have been praying to God a lot lately, and while I know He always hears me, I have struggled to sense His presence. I wondered how long I will continue to feel this dragging, lingering sadness. It seems like years since I enjoyed a happy, carefree and dreamy day–a day where I didn’t pretend to be cheery while inside I’m soggy, like a gravy covered biscuit. As I read the blog on patience I thought to myself that I really just want to read a story about someone who is waiting patiently for God and finding comfort. I want to hear the sweet sounding words of a friend saying, “God finally answered my prayers and I’m so encouraged!” I want to see with my eyes the healed body of a sick or broken friend so I can remember that He truly is not far from any of us. But I couldn’t find one so I decided to write one instead.

Dean Koontz wrote a wonderful little book titled “Bliss to You.” I like this book so much that I downloaded it on Audible so I can listen when I ride my bike. I also own a hard copy. This book contains 8 steps to finding bliss. The second step is Beauty. In the audible version, narrated by Teryn McKewin, she reads Trixie’s words with joyful inflection, “To find true bliss, you must see beauty of natural world all around you. Beauty helps calm you. Bad day at work, you almost assaulted fellow worker with stapler. Spend evening in garden, star-gazing, cuddling puppy, will lose homicidal urge.” She continues, “To see beauty of world, you must really, really, really look. Not look through. Not look at. Must look into.”

I stood in my front yard tonight and watched the robin sing. He was just a plain old robin by casual observance, but when I looked “into” I saw a magnificent creature–a king by all accounts–calling his court to come and bow at his feet. Even as I write this he is still singing, and my heart is ten shades brighter. And then there are those cotton candy clouds! To watch them floating casually across the sky–darkening as they move–is to experience, well, as Trixie would say, bliss!

These fleeting moments are what truly living is all about. No matter the pain, sorrow, or anxiety we face, we can always find beauty around us if we stop to look “into”. I suppose this is what the Psalmist was talking about when he wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1) In the middle of my soggy puddle, I experienced the glory of God and it was magnificent. Today, whatever you are facing, you can too—just stop and look “into”.