The Fight for Beautiful

J. M. Huxley
Nov 9, 2018
2 min read

Sometimes you don't need to fight for beautiful. Other times you need to tap into what's deep down inside you, to search and scour and dig to find it. To gently brush away the layers of impediment and imagine it there.

But on a fall morning such as this, beautiful is in the air. Every lung breathes it. It's bold and confident, a gift for the accidental and deliberate heart alike. It says, "Remember me? I've been here all along."

As I step outside on this fall day in Kansas, I do indeed remember. And there is something so simple in it, so utterly profound, I am made to cry. As I look my feet in the newly fallen snow, at a glistening prairie before me, the world silent and waiting, I connect with the truth of what lays in front of me.

Beautiful is always worth the fight for it.

The pear tree, its green leaves still in place and dusted with snow, was a sapling when we built our home here and not until this moment have I realized how faithful and intent it's been. It's grown and risen and assumed its rightful place in the seasons, just like the oak trees and the willow that have braved the storms, the holly bushes and the few evergreens that haven't given up.

Just like the little children who were here from the first, those who were young when we planted our hearts in the soil too, with great hope we'd walk the beautiful always, the ones who have now moved on to take root and stand elsewhere to find theirs.

And so it occurs to me that this insignificant, unspectacular tree is beautiful beyond words, in a deep down, symbolic kind of way. In the kind of way that is often so easily overlooked.

That pear tree, and others, will always stand as a reminder to me of accomplishment, of fighting to see beautiful.

That's the thing about beautiful. Sometimes it's as easy as a sunrise. Sometimes it requires vision. And I understand that no matter where we go from here, there will be the occasional fight to understand it-not just to see it, but to remember it's always there, something that will continue as long as we've breath on this planet, as long as we believe it's possible.

Beautiful is sometimes something you work for.

But when it's as obvious as this bright day highlighted in prisms of color and sprinkled with fairy dust, when it comes as grace that penetrates the heart with understanding, there is power for those times we'll go looking for it.