Your ability as a caregiver to linger in Beauty may often be compromised by work noise. Train your heart and you will see her amid that noise.

   Find new ways to experience beauty through your personal expressions. Whether you pick writing, painting, sculpting or another art form does not matter.

   What counts is your willingness to expand your definition of beauty beyond the way you may have experienced her in the past.

   Everyone likes Hallmark card images of flowers and small children. But, if we stop there we miss the gorgeous experience of abstract art, poetry that does not rhyme, the female nude & even the primal rhythms of rap music.

   It is not necessary to like all of these art forms. This is about meeting Beauty on different & richer terms. 

   Here is O'Donohue:

   Beauty does not linger, it only visits. Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm, it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life. Lest this be construed as a plea for decadence or a self-indulgence that is blind to the horrors of the world, we should remember that beauty does not restrict its visitations only to those whom fortune or circumstances favour. Indeed, it is often the whispers and glimpses of beauty which enable people to endure on desperate frontiers. Even, and perhaps especially, in the bleakest times, we can still discover and awaken beauty; these are precisely the times when we need it most.  Nowhere else can we find the joy that beauty brings.

   In your "bleakest times" as a caregiver, beauty extends her hand offering a private sanctuary where you may rest.

-Erie Chapman

Photograph: "Brown-Gold" – Erie