A Million Beautiful Things

I was stirred recently by a story about beauty. Not beauty seen, but beauty playing its heart out while people walked by unheeding.

For forty-five minutes, a world-class violinist on his multi-million dollar instrument graced a Washington D.C. subway station with the intricate, perfect music of Bach, and of the thousand-plus people that rushed past him, only seven stopped to listen...

Something tugs at my heart when I ponder that. All but seven failed to see and hear, and in so doing, they passed by treasure unaware, realizing too late that they had forfeited a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. How sad!

It's not that I blame the passers-by, or think them less valuable or cultured. After all, one doesn't go to the subway for recreation or relaxation. They were commuting--deadlines to make, appointments to keep. So they walked along unconscious. Rare beauty was in their midst and they did not perceive it.

Perhaps I would have been one who stood transfixed and let the music wash over me, feeling it lift me out of the milling crowd and into a different sphere while the world rushed by. I would like to think so. But I half suspect that the only real difference between them and me is that their failure to gaze upon beauty was recorded. Mine is not. There are a million beautiful things around me everyday, and I so often walk right past them, failing to see or hear as the tyranny of a time schedule of my own making propels me.

But I don't really want to be that way. No, I want to be one of the those that stop for beauty, whether it is the lacey design left in my cappucino cup after the warm, mellow foam recedes, the play of lights on a polished surface, the crunch of dry leaves in the creekbed or the laughter of a passing moment. How full our days really are of rarity and wonder. It's all around us! I want to step outside of my usual time-sensitive existence, stand transfixed by the small things that surround my life, all the riches of color, sounds, smells, tastes, textures; the nuances of relationships and the wonder of people, of cats and horses and singing birds; living in deep appreciation for beauty great and small. I don't want to come to the end of my days and my "to-do" list, and say, "Were there roses? I didn't notice...."

Sometimes You Have to go to Medford to get to Ashland...

I was in California last week, visiting my daughter (hence the hiatus from blogging), and while there, we took an excursion to Ashland, Oregon. We were on the hunt for a chair for her bedroom: something that would help create a reading nook and turn her rather generic space into one that more clearly reflected who she is. Not exactly sure what we were looking for, and unfamiliar with the territory, we ventured into a 2nd Hand/Antique shop off of Eighth Street. A quick perusal of the contents yeilded only one possibility--a set of 1880's Napoleonic parlor chairs in an interesting shade of green and a price perhaps a bit more than we'd anticipated doling out.

We passed them at a quick stroll, exited, and moved on to another shop. Nothing. But the owner of this particular store directed us down the road to a huge second-hand mall in Medford. In his words, "If you don't find it there, you won't find it anywhere." So down the road we went--a rather slow, traffic-light-pocked by-way of dubious beauty, eventually arriving at what we were sure was the place of which we'd been told. Wandering through a myriad of booths turned up only one possibility--another handcarved 1880's chair, closer to our price range, yet more of a desk chair than a setting chair. Recalling the man's statement, we almost purchased it, for fear that we would find nothing more in keeping with our shadowy picture.

However, after a period of hmm-ing and haw-ing , we ultimately headed back to Ashland to give the green chairs another look. That return trip brought its own set of anxieties: would the shop still be open? Would the chairs still be there, now that our eyes had turned back to them? Yes, they were, and before long, we were tootling down the road with one of them. Through the course of the week, we used that chair as the touchpoint to create a whole different feel in my daughter's room. A cover for her quilt. Pillows. Wall and window hangings: everything referenced back to our found treasure.

As I think back upon it, the whole experience seems fraught with allegory from the time we descended from sunshine in the mountains to heavy overcast in Ashland. We found the perfect thing there after much circuitous searching, and topped back into the sunshine just in time to watch the sun set. Having found something we didn't know we were looking for, it then became the reference for all successive choices.


How often we wander through our days looking for something we've glimsped in our hearts, be it direction, relationship, or dream, hoping we'll know it when we see it, and not totally confident we'll find it, after all. We wander about in the cloudiness of uncertainty, hesitant to depart from the familiar, fearful of missing the best, and not confident we know what that looks like. It is in these times that we often settle for less, as almost happened with the 1880's desk chair. True, it was lovely in itself with its dark carved roses and graceful cabrolet legs. But it was lesser.

Lord, from the lesser things in life, preserve us! May we not make decisions based on fear, but on the dream in our hearts. May we travel the byways in hope and faith that somewhere, sometime--if we do not settle for less--we will hold in our hands that which delights our heart. And may the knowledge that the sun still shines in the high blue heavens comfort and sustain us as we search the cloudy lowlands for treasure.