Beneath the Bluebirds

Stained-glass bluebirds and orange poppies glow against the amber, high-noon backdrop of my mother-in-law’s tiffany-style light fixture. They reflect the memory of my husband’s mother, a spirited, decisive woman who loved beauty, who loved me because she thought I was the “perfect” match for her son and wasn’t afraid to tell me so. 

This evening I sit beneath her custom-designed glass shade, typing words that require release, wondering at the impact and legacy of beauty.  How I am drawn to it, magnetized even, and yet so often without full understanding or due appreciation.  How I don’t recognize or enjoy it sometimes, how earthly blinders distract me.

And yet I crave beauty. I require it to make sense of things. According to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Beauty will save the world.” In some sense, beauty already has saved, and is in the process of saving, the world – doing so with love so expressive, so passionate and demonstrative that it transfigures every canvas it touches, as if with an artist’s brush.

Beauty illumines us, our circumstances, and even our vision.  It offers a glimpse of a greater reality that reconfigures the rough edges of everyday experience, even commonly overlooked minutiae, and sustains us during trials.  Beauty reveals, recovers, and nurtures us. It is our nature to seek it, just as a plant emerges from its seed-cocoon and reaches for light.