My four-year-old granddaughter was wide-eyed after she returned from seeing an acquarium filled with jellyfish.

   "What did they look like?" I asked

   "Like flags folding and unfolding," she answered. 

   I had been scanning poetry by Nobel Prize Winner Czeslaw Milosz for inspiration. I found nothing there more eloquent than the words spun by a four-year old.

   Psychologists report that most of us are geniuses until we reach the age of four or five. Our creativity until that age is unfettered.

   Adults wrap rules around the hearts of tiny children as rapidly as possible.  Much of our teaching is, of course, to help the young survive and thrive amid the shifting currents of life.

   But, all fears are taught (except the fear of falling and our startle reflex.) Soon, we become afraid to speak what we see because we may be punished or humiliated if we say or write the wrong thing.

  One reason I love photography is the way it enables me to frame some moments of the Beauty.

That's what I heard in the frail music playing through a woman crossing a forest floor many years ago. 

   Reveling in the rich woods, she was unaware that she was Beauty personified as the light caught her hair and illuminated her form against an emerald backdrop.

   The everyday world holds more of Beauty than we can imagine, but not more than we can seek to experience.

   The sickest patient carries his or her unique elegance.  The challenge is not whether it is there, but whether we can shake our biases so that we can see God in everyday details.

-Reverend Erie Chapman

Photograph – "Woman in the Woods – 1983" – copyright erie chapman 2012