Beauty

beauty. beauté. bellezza.

What is it? So much easier to say what it is not. What beauty is is at once so broad and so narrow, so difficult to capture as an artist and yet so inescapable a part of the human experience, that I doubt whether it has ever been adequately defined. Because part of what makes a sculpture or a piece of music or a poem or a scene from nature so lovely is an indefinable something beyond our power to describe, that nonetheless compels wonder.

Here is a patchwork of beautiful things, since (as many others before me have observed) beauty is meant to be shared:

Sunset over the Alps.

Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A Major Op 92. (Allegretto)  

The film The Fall (which actually introduced me to that movement, now one of my favorites among Beethoven's works)

Rodin's The Kiss

And, appropriately, W. B. Yeats's poem, "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

In case you hadn't guessed, I love music

I have a lot of other posts I've meant to write, but as I sit and work on a story to the accompaniment of The Avett Brothers' album The Carpenter, I feel compelled to share my new love for this band with you. I have too many favorites to mention on this album alone, so I'll just commend The Avett Brothers to your ears, and leave you with this first track from The Carpenter called (appropriately) "The Once and Future Carpenter."

Also worth a listen (be sure to watch the music video too) is "Switzerland," a single (from the debut album, Wikipedia tells me) by The Last Bison. Great band name, right?

Both bands are guaranteed to cheer up a gloomy Wednesday afternoon, such as this.

Montaña de Oro. Because I like taking pictures of signs, especially if they have words like "danger" on them.

In praise of solitude

Today I took a hike through Montaña de Oro. I forgot how much I miss exploring the unknown--and how much I enjoy being by myself sometimes. Moments of solitude seem to me essential to the creative mind; if you don't get away from everyone (and everything, including social media) once in a while, your mind is like a filter that collects and collects but can never process through the data. Maybe I speak more for introverts than creative personalities. Anyway, days like today, there are few things to compare to being truly alone with the sea and the sky and a trail you don't know the end of.

Morro Rock in the distance.