Epiphanies of Beauty

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by Christine

A study in flowers

One of the reasons I love photography, is that I can’t paint or draw.

But many times, it’s much more than that.  Sometimes, I go outside with my camera and inadvertently discover something.

finding beauty

Take this flower, for example. It’s a flower. It’s yellow. The rest of the plant is in serious need of being deadheaded. But, as far you know, this yellow flower is a sample of the beauty of my yard.

(unless you are my neighbor and you recognize it for the anomaly that it is!)

But then,  I take my macro lens and I zoom in. And because there was just the hint of a shake. And because my aperature wasn’t closed down quite enough, I got this.

20141014-IMG_9350-lowres

The overall effect is yellow and good enough. But mostly, we’ve lost sight of what it is.

I tried again, backing off a little and make some other kind of adjustment. It had just rained here, so I was trying to move in and catch the raindrop.

20141014-IMG_9354-lowres

I did. But I also caught the ugly and dying tips of the flowers that weren’t visible in that first picture above. And the tail end of a bug can be seen, too.

I can see the beautiful water drop. But what did it cost me?

I see it a lot today. We are so starved for beauty, we want it to be pure and crisp and clean. So we move in close.

We move in too close. We move in so close that we have lost sight of what the original image was. The flower was beautiful. There was beauty to be had and studied.

Move in close and the ugliness of dirt and decay spoil it for us.

We don’t need to do that all the time.

It’s okay to approach beauty and gaze on it. It’s okay to not dissect it and find the sin that wounded it.

finding beauty everywhere

 

 

 

It’s enough to know that flowers don’t last forever, and that it’s fall, and the flower is probably fading.

Gaze on the beauty where you find it.

Filed Under: Beauty will save the world, Being Catholic Tagged With: beauty

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Comments

  1. Eve says

    October 14, 2014 at 2:31 pm

    This is so true! It’s amazing to me how beauty can be a reflection of truth. And how we can miss the beauty altogether just by focusing on all the wrong bits. /points finger at self. Focusing on the beauty has to be a conscious decision. Odd that it doesn’t come easy?

    • Christine says

      October 15, 2014 at 8:14 am

      It may need to be a conscious decision. Sometimes, though, a flower is just pretty. For me, the struggle is to not to tear it up after I’ve seen it. To dig too deep and twist it.

  2. Regan says

    October 15, 2014 at 3:12 am

    So true…such wise words my friend…don’t even get me started on photoshop and “altering” beauty…see I even find the dead tips of the flower to be beautiful…❤️

    • Christine says

      October 15, 2014 at 8:16 am

      I can see that in all of your photography! You make it all look beautiful.

    • Regan says

      October 18, 2014 at 10:46 pm

      You flatter meeee!!! Gah!! ❤️❤️❤️So glad to see you writing again…I’ve been toying with the idea too…I even have a NAME for my new blog…will it happen? Probably not. I’ve grown so lazyyyyy…

  3. AnaMaria says

    October 15, 2014 at 4:21 pm

    Hear hear! Love this post

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Reader, writer, pontificator. I like coffee, gardens other people grow, the Sacraments, and hyperbole.

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