In Search of Beauty

What is beauty? Your beauty? There are so many kinds. From the, "oh that's beautiful", to beauty that catches your breath. What stops you in your tracks?

Last week, my mom and I got to go play and explore Victoria BC and the Butchart Gardens.

At the Butchart Gardens there were millions of flowers. I have no idea who and how they plant so many annuals! Who deadheads and plants all these flowers!!?

This is a deeply planned and executed garden. A walking experience, engulfed in beauty. Flowers thoughtfully placed and planned. Aesthetics of beauty- 100 years in the making.

But there were moments that stopped me in my tracks...

We were walking on a path, turned the bend.... there was a giant, powerful Sequoia Tree. Huge- how do you even describe this? I've no idea...

humbling-old-powerful?

Close to the end of the garden paths is the Japanese garden. Maybe because there had been so much color so much to look at, it was here my nervous system, my breath relaxed. Green, just green and trickling water and breathing.

We sat and whispered.

But the flower that stole my heart was outside professional garden.

The next morning walking with my mom, climbing the stairs on the beach, there was this flower. This wild California poppy, growing in tiny crack, on the concrete stairs. Wild, thriving, where not much grows. This is the flower.

"Bloom where you are planted."

Beauty is everywhere, always, but how many days do I walk by beauty?

What is the beauty that stops you in your tracks? What do you love?

"Wabi-Sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace."

Leonard Koren- Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers

Beauty is a personal relationship. It speaks beyond our eyes into our bodies and spirits. Beauty is time with your mom.

Enjoy. Denise

This is wabi sabi beauty.