A Lament In Beauty

by Anonymous

I have a tree in my family’s front yard that I can see through my window, birds will flutter past or onto it and even hop onto the roof in front of my window. The tree is probably older than me and maybe even my siblings. Every year it drops its leaves and hibernates through the winter. Every year it extends the little green solar panels from its limbs. Every year it makes seeds to spread more of itself far and wide across the grass. Every day I wake up and the tree is right there, stalwart and unmoving. I know there are trillions of little things that make it up, that its roots reach deep into the ground in a manner comparable to the way its branches spread to keep it in the earth. I know every last one of the little things that make it up contain identical sets of DNA in order to make proteins and hundreds of other useful things.

I could go on describing the tree in this manner, but it would not be glorifying to God to describe one of his creations as a machine made of trillions of “little things.” God created the tree to be a piece of art, something beautiful and to share and be shared with. The concept of Beauty is lost on me. I do not know why, I have only ever described something as beautiful once, and it was a song, I cannot remember which one though. I like to climb trees, and I like to build things with it, but I have never been able to appreciate something for the sake of beauty. I can appreciate the insane amount of thought God must have put in the tree, but I have never called a tree beautiful. I have seen pictures of The Mona Lisa, but I have never thought about beauty when I saw it, I only thought about the painstaking hours Davinci must have spent to make it look the way it does and to give the eyes their characteristic movement. I listen to quite a bit of music, but most of it I would not call beautiful; I can appreciate the hard work and effort put into making the song, writing the lyrics, and performing it with no mistakes on stage, but I do not see it as beautiful. When I look at things others describe as beautiful, I only see a lacking in myself.