Life and beauty

If you are an artist, or creative in any manner, you know how the appreciation of beauty can hit you. 
Maybe you learned about it from looking at a sunset, or listening to a bird.  But the beauty that is created by nature, or by a person through a painting or a symphony, lets our lives be a bit richer.

Panther, Kalanchoe, Geranium in window

I think it's also important for the continuation of life.  Maybe not for a single individual, or even a single species, but that's something scientists and Darwin might argue.

For me beauty isn't just the frosting on the cake of our lives, but something that allows us to pause and move from simple survival strategies to a place that gives us a reason for being.

Simple survival...food, shelter, comfort, safety from enemies that would do us harm, health enough to provide the things we need, and then some sense of why we are.  That's where I think beauty speaks to us. We need intellect in order to appreciate more than just the survival instincts. .

Lavender, Amaryllis

Now that many of us have tightened our seat belts for a bumpy ride that we're imagining about to happen, we need to know that our survival is intact.  And we need to know that art and nature are in tune with our survival. Are they? Well, the good news is that they are not totally subject to the whims of any political entity.  Yes there can be rules made (laws?) and enforced (I'm reminded of Robert Motherwell.) But there is also the sense that as long as one person survives to see that sunset, or to smell a rose's fragrance, or to hear some bird, or the breeze in some tree...then beauty survives as well as life.

Does beauty itself help the continuation of our species?  I guess I have to have faith that there will always be beauty...even the thought of it can survive when we live in the bleakest environments.

Today's Quote:

When we understand how precious each moment is, we can treat each breath, each moment, as a newborn baby.

Michelle McDonald