Week 17: Find Beauty

[FeeHutch]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder so they say.

This morning my youngest daughter wanted a big old hug and rather than worry about whether our taxi was here and whether we had everything I just hugged her back. She started doing butterfly kisses (fluttering her eyelashes against my cheek) and I can't remember the last time she did that. I just looked at her, felt the kisses, noticed how her eyes are hazel around the iris and a beautiful green around that. I look at her every day but today I noticed again how beautiful she is.

[JonW]

What a lovely post, Fee.

[Gareth]

It's situations like this that make the practice so life changing. Imagine how much good for your being that situation did, just by simply not following the thought that the taxi might be here.

Beauty is everywhere, all the time. We just need to be paying attention to see it.

[Steve]

My thoughts/experience of this week:

Beauty is always there, we just have to notice it and take it in to appreciate it, whether in just a simple thing or a loved one.

Or is beauty only there when we appreciate it? Is a flower beautiful in its own right when no-one sees it or is 'beauty' only created when we interact with it by seeing it?

Either way, it seems we have the power to see/appreciate beauty if we want to or allow ourself to do so.

It often strikes me when I'm outside that I am either oblivious to my surroundings because I'm so wrapped up in my thoughts, or if I am in a foul mood, I don't appreciate the beauty around me because I don't let myself, or if I open up to what I can see and let it in, then I see beauty. Nothing has changed outside, it depends entirely on how I interact with it.

Steve

[Gareth]

I was thinking just the same as I was driving along the other day. I was looking at a cloud (one of my favourite things), and appreciating how beautiful it was. I was thinking to myself that the beauty of clouds never changes; it's only my internal weather that changes.