John Keats wrote that a thing of beauty is a joy forever. But when does someone begin to recognize a thing as “beauty”? Last week, I responded to the question in my post What Do You Care About? with one word: beauty. I care about beauty. But when did I begin to care about it and why? In a comment to my post this past Tuesday, When A Great Tree Falls, Carol wrote: “What that we all would take the time to Notice, Reflect, Ponder and Wonder the mysteries of our world, fallen and falling though it may be!” Did my ability to notice, reflect, ponder and wonder the mysteries of the world develop or was I born with it?
This post marks the first of several posts I plan to write and share as I explore how I came to care so much about beauty. First, was I born to care about beauty?
Does the definition of beauty offer a clue? The Oxford English Dictionary defines beauty as “that quality or combination of qualities which delights the senses or mental faculties, especially that combination of shape, color and proportion which is pleasing to the eye.”
Ah . . . “pleasing to the eye”. Those words catch my attention because I was born with congenital strabismus — an eye disorder that prevented me from directing the gaze of both of my eyes to the same object simultaneously which may explain why my television watching back then was up close and personal.
But wait . . . behind that bad right eye was a little girl with a vision.
Because my right eye deviated, I saw things double, including my first memory: two letter “A’s” scraped into the bedroom wallpaper above the bar on my crib. I had formed the letters using a clip from one of the barrettes my mother used to keep hair out of my crossed eyes. As a toddler, I used those barrettes to scratch out letters wherever I crawled, including the moist dirt of my mother’s towering ficus behind the living room sofa. My mother once told me that no matter how many times she scolded and cleaned up after me, I’d be back the next day, trying to write, making another dirty mess.
Was this one writer’s beginnings? A writer who would one day see and love the beauty of words?
STAY TUNED . . .
Ahhhh beauty. Visual beauty. Not that I don’t appreciate it but I’m not much of a visual person. I’m drawn more to the beauty of silence, of fullness, of presence, of emotion. Is that why I’ve never been a “nature” person or a gardening person? Maybe. But I love reading about other people’s visual interactions with the world.
Fascinating, Neola. I never considered “the beauty of silence, of fullness, of emotion,” which do indeed have their own beauty. One of the things I love about my treks in farmland is not just the visual beauty, but also the silence. I hear nature, but not the mind-numbing sounds of technology and traffic and the banter of most people in public places.
Interestingly, I didn’t begin to really recognize the beauty in nature or gardening until after I retired and got theeee hell out of the corporate world. My friend, Rick, recently asked me what super power I would want if I could have a super power and I responded, “the power to turn back time, specifically, my time in corporate America.” So much bullshit. So little beauty.
I hear you. I regret buying into working myself into the ground over and over for entities and people who didn’t care and for products that didn’t even exist anymore. Yeesh. I knew in college that I would never be successful as a corporate weenie but never fully dealt with what that should have meant in my career.
I hear you, too.❤️❤️