"Let the beauty we love be what we do." -Rumi 

   While hiking in Nashville's Radnor woods my friend Minton Sparks snapped a picture & sent it. We share a joint fascination with Beauty's many voices. 

   Obvious Beauty can be noticed with a glance. Like love, the real experience of her requires conscious presence & the education of our souls so that all our senses can dance with this grand energy.

    Minton's eye catches Beauty in the crosshairs of a shaft of sunset bisecting not only the slender oak in the foreground but the triplet of adult trees, thick & somber overseers of their slender child.

    Symbolists see more: the strength of trees, the wreckage of the departed, the audience of society in the background, the suggestion of Jesus on the cross & whatever else appears as you live with this image.    

    What is "resident beauty"? Beauty as a "tenant" requires reconsidering this essential friend of our existence. Beauty takes up residence in us, in objects, in nature. But, as Shelley wrote, "It visits with inconstant glance…"

   How frustrating. Why cannot she always inhabit us instead of sometimes vanishing so that Shelley asked, "Spirit of Beauty…where art though gone?" 

   She departs when we admit intruders: Fear appears in endless forms. Distrust, Revenge, Greed are among the powerful enemies that drive Beauty from the house of our heart.

   Indifference is among Beauty's most dangerous opponents because it is not recognized as such. Beauty can gain no purchase in the heart unless we actively honor her. This requires vulnerability – a choice that sometimes brings pain & thus requires courage.

   When we serve Beauty we live Love. When we live Love we live our best selves. That is why tending Beauty's garden is a gift beyond measure.

-Erie Chapman

Photograph: Minton Sparks, March, 2021