Beauty and the Sacred

"The lover of Beauty ends by finding it everywhere around him.

The vein of gold in the basest of ores.

And he takes the collector's joy

in finding

the fragmentary masterpiece that is commonly passed by."

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

My wife and I did some backyard landscaping in our new home this summer. We put in new trees, bushes and plants. And a dry stone creek bed. When our granddaughter Kendall came to visit for her Granny's surprise 70th Birthday get-together, she disappeared for a bit. She was in the back, by the border fence, playing with the stones. We didn't even see what she had made, until after the party. What we found was her little altar, a place of beauty, of safety, of the sacred. It's all around us. Let's try really hard to notice, as Kendall does.