Beauty

"Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."

-  Franz Kafka

For the last few days it's been raining steadily here in Guatemala City. As I write this, it's even a bit chilly. (Brrrr.)  Despite the weather though, and despite my overwhelming desire to crawl into my bed and sleep for hours and hours while it's raining, I need to search for beauty.  I have to find at least one or two things that strike me as beautiful.  

But I'm not looking at this as just the completion of an assignment.  I truly believe it's important for all of us to search for beauty every day, because too often we blindly, and aimlessly stroll through our lives without stopping to look around.

When it comes to beauty, there is so much I could write about.  I could write about the little birds that hobble into my classroom every morning as I get ready for school.  They bob their heads back and forth searching for crumbs of food that my students have left behind.  I could write about the way the rain splashes against the pavement, or how it explodes when it falls into puddles.  I could write about the people I see each day that make me smile.  

But I won't.

Instead I'm going to write about one thing in particular that's beautiful, but that I often overlook.  It's a tree.  I can't tell you the type of tree it is, because I really have no idea, but I can tell you that it's fairly tall, fairly green, and fairly unique.  You see, it has these bristles that, when the

 wind blows through them just right, it looks as if there were luau dancers attached to the tree, dancing through the breeze.  I'm sure people have passed this tree, and even looked at it a thousand times without ever picturing this, but sometimes my imagination takes over and I can't see anything but the giant luau. For me it's a very distinct, beautiful tree.

Finally, the view from my apartment is also captivating.  In the morning I watch as the sun rises and changes the colors of the sky from a dark blue to orange.  Then in the afternoon it slowly fades from gold to dark blue to black.  And even the lights are beautiful in the night, as I think about how much the world has progressed over time.

Regardless of what I encounter each day though, in the end, beauty is not so much WHAT we see, but HOW we see it.