Beauty.

I seek this. I want to experience beauty in my life.  I want my life to encompass and to express beauty and usefulness and meaning.  I search for beauty all around me. It is all around me.  I use my senses to detect it, experience it, and to make note of it. I record reminders of it with my pen and with my iPhone and with my sketchbook and with my laptop and with the telling of a story.  This is beautiful – and I try to capture it for future reference. . . on the page, on my phone, on my social networking page, on my desktop, on canvas.

Real Beauty takes up residence.  It lives within.  Sometimes in obscurity, but it is there.  Without sensing and experiencing Real Beauty, my inspiration to write flounders for oxygen.  Writing.  Writing dictates my sense of  soul survival.  I will write.  I sit at my desk and salad spin my ideas into various folders on my external hard drive and various flash drives and stretch for oxygen. I breathe to resuscitate my soul’s desire to record that which will give my life meaning.  A reflection, a glimpse of Real Beauty.

All the while, beauty has every opportunity to exhale out of me. Out of my words, my senses, my actions, my intentions. These Hands have the power to create beauty from that which is within. I can make a difference by simply being present.  This is what my humble soul reminds me of on a daily basis: You can make a difference.  You can be the change.  You can create something useful and beautiful.  You have a purpose.  You have purpose.

I think of the day when I was walking down at the harbor and, in the near distance, I saw an older woman with a kite. She was dressed for the wind — which I wasn’t — and she was walking and jerkily working her line to get her kite up into a fresh gust. Her age precluded her from running into the wind. Her face turned back — hoping to watch her kite take flight.

I don’t know why, but this image tugged at me . . . a sadness took hold of my spirit . . . until I realized that she was the one out in the elements seeking to create magic in the sky. I was merely walking off a recent argument with my now ex-boyfriend, knowing that he had extruded a far-from-positive reaction from me in the midst of the discussion.

I was out on that very chilly day wanting to realign my thinking, my sense of being, and my sense of believing. My sense of wonder and beauty and meaning.  I wanted to see some beauty in not succeeding. Not only in my own life but in seeing that wind-less kite on the grass.  The day did not hold a lot of promise of bliss or serenity or flight.

As I approached the woman, I felt a wave of reticence wash over me. Should I offer help? If I do, will that come across as condescending? Should I allow this person her independence and the satisfaction of having accomplished the task on her own once the kite is up in the air?

I know. Too much thinking.  My rational brain was warring with and winning over my emotional brain.  I walked past her and then stopped. There is never harm in offering help if the intention is pure.  Decision made.  I asked.  She said Yes. 

I ran with her kite until she yelled for me to stop. She told me to just toss it up in the air and she could take it from there. I tossed her kite twice before the wind grabbed it. The woman’s eyes were on her kite. She was smiling. Such a small moment of exchange, but I could feel nature’s pulse in the line as the wind grabbed it from my hands. There was truly no tossing on my part involved. The wind did all the work.

As I left, she told me thank-you-so-much.  She didn’t think that she could have raised the kite on her own.  She said that there was a group of people who meet down at the park each Wednesday afternoon and that I should come and bring a kite and join them.

I go to the harbor every Wednesday, but I haven’t brought a kite with me. Instead, I lie on my back on a grassy hill and watch the toss of brilliant colors in the blue sky.  I look for her kite. It is one of the smaller kites, some of them being extraordinarily extravagant and gregarious.

I see her green and red tree frog soaring in the wind, and the incongruity of a frog flying feels ironically beautiful. I am watching something tangibly impossible. I am witnessing a miracle.  And I remind myself that I was able to touch that miracle on a gray-sky day when no one was down at the park but she and I.

Seeing the woman with her Kite Club, it strikes me odd that she was all alone the day that I met her.  Maybe she was chasing her own demons around that day. Maybe she just wanted to catch some wind.  Maybe she just loves to fly her frog.

By me offering to help her, she helped me. She put my mind up into the sky and out of the mire where an unpleasant exchange of words had sunk me. Or more aptly put, where I had sunk me.

I create what I allow.  I witness beauty when I open my eyes. My mind. My heart.  I experience beauty when I allow freedom of light and love to flow into my skies.  I feel so blessed to have been a part of that kite’s flight.  I can still remember the tug of wind and the release I experienced by over-riding my rational and emotional barriers.

Life is good these days.  I am soaring, and I appreciate the stillness as much as I do the wind.  Beauty is in every molecule and these molecules enter into me without thought.  The beauty exists in great abundance.  Blessings abound.  They are amplified by the stillness in each present nano-moment.  I am happy.