beauty lost

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Beauty.

They say you cannot sing the blues unless you have actually lived them. Is the same true for awareness of the beauty around you? Do you have to live awhile to truly appreciate it?

In his book “The Architecture of Happiness,” Swiss writer Alain de Botton writes, “We may need to have made an indelible mark on our lives, to have married the wrong person, pursued an unfulfilling career into middle age or lost a loved one before architecture can begin to have any perceptible impact on us, for when we speak of being ‘moved’ by a building, we allude to a bitter-sweet feeling of contrast between the noble qualities written into a structure and the sadder wider reality within which we know them to exist...

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.”

Let me repeat that, "It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value."

De Botton was speaking of architecture but the same holds true for the natural world. At its heart, architecture imitates the noble aesthetics—balance, grace, form—found in nature.

At a time when dead black birds are falling from the sky for unknown reasons—the sadder wider reality of our degraded environment—my home state of Tennessee is considering opening a hunting season on sandhill cranes.

How unfortunate.

Recently I received the above wonderful photo from Gretchen Kaplan. She captured the image of sandhill cranes in flight at Bosque del apache, New Mexico last year. She is concerned that a hunter in our state, in a moment of confusion, might shoot at a sandhill and accidentally kill an even rarer thing, an endangered whooping crane. Indeed.

In the context of the sadder wider reality, any beauty lost is one small piece we will never get back.

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