Summer Remembered

Seeds of this season have long been sown. Now the fragile plants of May are tall and fruitful and groaning for harvest. The season has been good, bright and warm mostly. Still the days have passed with enough rain to let the little green seedling mature to tall and dusky and ripe plants. Late September grasses blow in the mild winds. Apple trees are weighted down with their sweet fruits. Harvest is due.

Nature's palate takes a turn right here, right now. Where once a thousand nuanced shades of green spread out across the horizon, now flames of orange and red have begun to spread. Red, orange, yellow and dark almost purple colors are emerging from the canopy of leaves that line the roads I walk. It is a riot of rich, rich color. Both celebration of and elegiac of one good season they please the senses.

In walking cascading thoughts as to beauty, trust, truth, motivation, desire, hope, love; well they all rush through the brain. Me I keep returning to the idea of the meaning of beauty. What does it mean to call something beautiful?  What do I mean when I call someone beautiful?

Beauty is something true, at least that is what I think when I ruminate upon it.  Beauty means that the thing called beautiful is so true as to be pleasing to the mind, the eye, the ear, the heart and well to almost any of the senses.  True beauty is something not just surface, not just ephemeral.  Beauty is a construct of the thing’s essence.

When I call someone beautiful I am not talking about a physical form I am talking about their spirit.  Beauty is a heart seeking to become all that it has any right to be on God’s green earth.  Therein lays beauty, in a spirit’s search for the real.  With true beauty can come love.

Love arises slowly, grows into a blaze and then settles into a warming fire. Love’s embers can linger for a lifetime. The trick is learning to discern the difference between the start of love and the start of lust. I think you catch the difference in the glimmer of an eye, in the tone with which a word is spoken and in the way a phrase is laid out.

Lust can arise quite quickly. Normally it will pass like the summer rain. Heated passions arise in a moment but in the end they leave not a trace. Like a shooting star they can neither be contained nor caught. In the end having experienced lust a few times I have learned that you don't cling to passing moods.

Writers may speak only through the world of letters but their words can be infused with carefully turned and meaningful phrases.  The way in which particular writer speaks is a viewing point into a human heart.  With each word a writer puts down love may grow.  Seeds planted with words can envelop the heart like a canopy of bright fall leaves.  Beauty leads to love.  Love leads to awareness.