On Beauty...

In responding to a comment on another online venue, on how nice it must be to be "talented" I had these thoughts this morning...

I'm reading currently "Beauty- The Invisible Embrace" by John O'Donohue

Take this one short paragraph-

John O'Donohue - 

To behold beauty dignifies your life; it heals you and calls you out beyond the smallness of your own self-limitation to experience new horizons.  To experience beauty is to have your life enlarged

To cultivate a habit of subjecting yourself to nature's and the Creator's beauty, is to live in such a way so foreign to many in the day's hustle bustle dog eat dog world...but it is sane, it is embracing simplicity and finding joy in it.

It is a blessing to have the otherwise hidden sense of the more to be experienced in the more isolating habit of painting, taking it in...as something you carry around with you, part of you.

In the beginning, I think...one believes the "more" equates to the opportunity for reputation, praise, esteem, advances in stature and demand, earning potential...but, little by little, piece by piece time chips away at these things and reveals their temporal nature as well as their hollow, shallow promises.

As it turns out, its not what beauty you've given the world after all...but what beauty, what hearing the whispers of the Almighty gained in pursuit have given to you that becomes ones' fuller measure, ones' prize.  The great blessing...

To live to the full...before the potential time of regret...