Hoping you have this kind of a day today.
So what could I do?
Category: Beauty
Eyes graced with wonder
Thank you to Elliott Blackwell for pointing me to this quote:
When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see. – John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
Window lace
A couple of days ago I had to go to the dentist. As I sat in the chair, I gazed out the window upon the house next door which had some lovely lace curtains in the windows. Such a beautiful thing: lace curtains. I hope you can find some yourself to gaze upon. Or better yet, gaze through.
What a wonderful world
Made me smile. Beautiful rendition of Louis Armstrong’s song. “. . . breathtaking and ever-poignant . . .”
O Beauty so ancient
May the beauty of this song wash over you and speak deeply to your heart this day.
For a moment
A hidden glory
“Sainthood is the simple process by which the life of God so illumines and fills the empty places of our sorrowing hearts that we are filled up brimful with him, his goodness directing our actions, forming our words, quieting our anguish, driving our compassion, until we begin to resemble the whole and healed creations we will fully become in the new world ahead.
“And that is a beauty more potent than any other the world has known.
“But often it’s a hidden glory.”
(Sarah Clarkson)
In beauty
“In that divine and present Beauty, the story of the world begins anew. Through beauty, we are called from the shadow-sight of pain into the opened horizon of hope. Story and song, storm and image, these help us recognize a beauty beyond the touch of evil: some the lived before our pain, endures after it and works to make it whole. In beauty, I believe, we encounter Christ, whose incarnate loveliness restored the broken world and is at play even now in creation–in art, music, and story, and in the presence of others as we are encountered by Christ in our neighbor, ‘lovely in eyes and lovely in limbs not his.'” (Sarah Clarkson)
Sparkling wonders
This morning I saw two wonders. The first I had never seen before–rainbow colors in the clouds next to the sun. So glorious. I surmised it was some kind of an effect because of the cold. And sure enough: “A rainbow cloud can occur because of something called cloud iridescence. It usually happens in altocumulus, cirrocumulus, lenticular and cirrus clouds. Iridescent clouds happen because of diffraction – a phenomenon that occurs when small water droplets or small ice crystals scatter the sun’s light.” I couldn’t take a picture because I was driving, but I’ve added one below that is close to what I saw.
The other wonder is one that I have seen many times before. It delights me as much as seeing sparkles on the water, and that is: sparkling snow. My life changed when one of my Sisters showed me how you could actually see color refracted in the snow. See photo below (not taken by me). Nothing like it. 
#sunriseissunset
My friend, Nico, recently uploaded some magnificent shots of a sunrise in the mountains, so I must share them here. Another good friend, Mako Fujimura, has been tweeting sunrise and sunset photos under the hashtags #sunriseissunset and #sunsetissunrise because a sunrise here is certainly a sunset somewhere else in the world. I hope you enjoy these sunrise/sunset photos.
Wonder and Beauty 