People close to me know that I often “See” (Feel?) a poem in things around me. They will catch me taking a photograph and say “There’s a poem in that one.” They recognize that about me and the way I see things, the fact that I see stories in things, and even when I do not recognize the exact story in a picture, I know it is there and take the picture. Days, weeks, even years later the poem shows itself.

I also take a lot of pictures of flowers. A LOT of pictures of flowers. Wild flowers. Botanical gardens. Water lillies. Blooms from my own garden. (like the one above). When I go through my photographs, they are everywhere. Even when supposedly I am there to shoot something else, I find the flowers and take the pictures.

No story. No lesson. Just beauty.

There is a lot of beauty in my world. Yours too, probably. Little snippets of it. Great glorious splashes of it. Flowers. Art. Still lifes. Children. Women. Men. Sky. The full moon. Ice in the winter. The deep greens of summer. Autumn leaves. The first new buds of spring. (Happening now here in Vermont.). The cup of coffee in front of me at the diner is beautiful in its simplicity and contrast of the milky brown coffee and the stark white cup. Cats. Some dogs. Birds.

Beautiful things. I love going to nice restaurants as much for the atmosphere as the food. I love going to historic houses to soak in the colonial era simplicity as well as the guilded age opulence. I love the early morning sun on the farms as I drive to town to do my work. And the afternoon “golden hour” sun on the fields as I head home.

When I moved from Virginia to Vermont, I was startled at the difference in the light here. It has a quality I can’t put words to. There is a gentleness to it. A crispness. Colors are somehow different. You likely have no idea what I am talking about unless you have traveled far from your home, and paid attention to the light, not just the scenery. I know I had traveled extensively before moving up here and somehow the change in light did not get noticed.

But here, it did.

Some beauty is flagrant. There was a time I would become speechless when confronted with a beautiful woman or a garden in June. It jumps out at you, impossible to ignore.

And then there is the other kind. Quieter. Less splashy, and yet…. it is everywhere.

Maybe I look for it more than most. I see it in the people I meet. People you would likely not think of as beautiful. I see it in objects, particularly historic, functional objects. I see it especially in people who do not think they are beautiful, and yet, the longer I look at them, the longer I know them, they are indeed beautiful.

Beauty is important to me. I like being surrounded by it. I like it in my life. I like being surrounded by it. I like creating it. I like capturing it. I daydream beauty. I write to it. I remember it.

That memory is probably part of the reason I see beauty in so many places. The flower in the photograph for instance. It’s pretty enough by itself. But it also brings memories of one of my homes in Virginia where I planted the same flower in the walled rock garden behind the house. It reminds me of my father in law, an avid gardener and someone I loved dearly.

At my age, everything reminds me of something else. A beautiful this carries with it the beauty of things or people past. The same is true of people. When I look at people I have known for a long time, I see the beauty they carry now, but also the beauty from 10, 20, 30 years ago. It all melds into something special.

Nothing it seems, is just what it is. Everything is a sum of things. Including beauty. What that has meant for me is that my world is more beautiful as I age. The people I love, including the woman I love, become more beautiful with time.

I am aware that is not how others see. It is not how others see themselves. That’s OK. I can’t see for others. I can only see for myself, the way I see. And I see beauty. And it sustains me. It reminds me of the profligate love of God as he creates. Beauty everywhere.

It’s a good day. Again. Time to get some seeds. Flowers of course.

Tom