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Everything Is Beautiful
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you search for “the most beautiful thing in the world”, the two most common things that come up are love and nature. Searching for “beautiful” or “beauty” shows plenty of pictures and quotes about women, children, animals, love, nature, and anything else you can possibly imagine. It’s impossible to narrow down the most beautiful thing in the world because everyone has their own idea of beauty.
It’s easy to find beauty in nature, or people, or events that are pleasant. It’s far more difficult to find beauty in things that are typically considered unattractive or ugly. You often have to find the beauty surrounding the ugliness so you can see the ugliness in a new light. Everything has some level of beauty to it. Everything is beautiful if you’ll just look for the beauty, and you can only see the beauty if you make the decision to look for it.
Ray Stevens said it best in his song Everything is Beautiful.
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Published in Group Writing
So much of how much of our perception is in how we choose to see things.
I remember seeing a black and white image of cigarette butts in a gutter that I found quite beautiful. I don’t know whether the photographer found them like that, or arranged them, but they were quite artistically arranged, side by side. The photographer wished to draw attention to cigarette-butt litter with an image that was still beautiful. I think he succeeded. Can’t find the picture anymore, though.
Choice is the biggest factor in life.
I actually love pictures like that.
Now I have the song stuck in my head. Not a bad thing…
Thank you for this!
This conversation is part of a Group Writing series with the theme “Beauty”, planned for the whole month of August. If you follow this link, you can see the links to other August posts, which will be updated as the month goes on. The theme for September is “Cars,” please click on this link and sign up!
Except for birth, death, falling in love, &c.
Also, natural gifts & limitations, powers & mutilations…
Also, the accidents that bring loved ones to us & tear them away.
Also, catastrophes.
Julie, that’s a contradiction in terms. If there is an idea of the beautiful, everyone cannot have his own. If everyone has some notion of his own, there cannot be a common name for all these idiosyncrasies.
It cannot be both that popularity puts nature & love & children & whatever atop the google results–& that beauty is really personal, individualistic, not the same for everyone.
Nope. Choice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNAQ9lbe3kw
‘Choice is a meaningless word for everything.’
Are you saying you would like to sign up for the Quote of the Day?
No, but you can expect to read about the destruction of the meaning of the word choice in my book. Time was when folks thought choice issues from principles. Now, choice is thought to be antecedent of principle. As though it were unbearable to be human without presumption of a kind of control over being as such.
Although, the recent gardening post recalled to me some stuff on gardening, so there’ll be quoting there. If you have slots you can’t fill for this week–I’m your huckleberry.
This week is filled. Next week has slots.
I guess I could be lazy. Why not…
Do they grow huckleberries in Romania?
You really like slaughtering rainbows, huh? :P
I thought no one grew them–that’s the point! But the answer is still no-
Huckleberries are the most popular berry grown in Montana.