I Look Only if I Know There’s More to be Found

Few moments of my day (and night) are not filled with thoughts: self-analyzing ones; funny or ironic ones; important, life-changing ones; perceptions; understandings (often years in the making); meager ideas about dinner and getting the laundry in the dryer; connections among this, that, and the other: almost always the result of words gathered in books mixing with what I find in my online wanderings, and my own experiences. Some of the most exciting thoughts occur when I see something, like right now: lines of scintillating sunlight on the table and chairs in the kitchen at my left. It’s beautiful and fleeting and not only am I grateful for having seen it, I know that someday, somehow, it will help me put together a drawing, a painting, a photograph, or maybe even a poem that will leave me bubbling with joy.

Fyodor Dostoevsky was wrong. Beauty will not save the world; truth will. Beauty can penetrate and change a heart and soul only after one finally grasps the truth, and most of us don’t even know that we have been lied to.