Everyday Canvas

Beauty

Prompt: What is beauty to you? How would you describe beauty?

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Beauty is interpretative, and not only according to each person but to each time the same person sees beauty. We all see beauty in different things at different times because it is everywhere and in everything. Something or someone can be imperfect or permanently flawed, and still be beautiful

Beauty can be in small things like an act of unselfish kindness or a single cloud in the sky or the sun going down slowly at a colorful sunset or a tiny flower or weed pushing its way through a crack in the most unexpected places.

On a larger scale, nature such as forests, clouds in the sky, wheat fields, vastness of the ocean, rivers and waterfalls, mountains and hills, or moonlight on a pristine snowy backyard give comfort to the spirit and bring forth thoughts of the value and duty of the living things, especially human beings who should leave their marks in the least obtrusive and blatant way. I think nature is a grant to humankind, not only with the sight of it but with the other sensations it evokes like the smell of dark earth after rain or the cawing of the blackbirds or meowing of kittens.

Then, beauty is in the arts. Music defies description. I know it from the way it makes me feel, the way it makes me hold my breath and listen. Also, all visual arts and writing. When I read a passage in a book or a friend’s poem I receive such a strong emotional response that makes me want to be in the piece of writing, become the words and the lines, and I hold my breath and wish to keep reading the same passage over and over or look at a piece of art that brings about such a response.

Being with friends and family members and doing things together is another form of beauty to me. It is the beauty of the moment, a deeper kind of beauty that stays in the mind for decades.

Above all, I believe that beauty is implanted in the human soul and what a human being sees to be as beautiful is the mirroring of herself or himself.