loveliness

The state of mind above which my distraction floats like fog is suddenly perfectly clear, though the right word for it is less immediately available. Grief is too sharp and immediate; maybe it__ the high pitch of the vowel sound, or the monosyllabic impact of the word, as quick a jab as knife or cut. Sadness is too ephemeral, somehow; it sounds like something that comes and goes, a response to an immediate cause which will pass in a little while as another cause arises to generate a different feeling. Mourning isn__ bad, but there__ something a little archaic about it. I think of widows keening, striking themselves- dark-swathed years, a closeting of self away from the world, turned inward toward an interior dark. Sorrow feels right , for now. Sorrow seems large and inhabitable, an interior season whose vaulted sky__ a suitable match for the gray and white tumult arched over these headlands. A sorrow is not to be gotten over or moved through in quite the way that sadness is, yet sorrow is also not as frozen and monochromatic as mourning. Sadness exists inside my sorrow, but it__ not as large as sorrow__ realm. This sorrow is capacious; there__ room inside it for the everyday, for going about the workaday stuff of life. And for loveliness, for whatever we__e to be given by the daily walk.

For me,you are fresh waterthat falls from treeswhen it has stopped raining. For me, you are cinnamon that lingers on the tongue and givesbitter wordssweetening.For me, you are the scent of violins and visionof valleys smiling.And still,for me, your loveliness never ends.It traverses the worldand finds its way back to me.Only me.

I haven__ written you a poem in years it seems.How can it be my faultwhen the words to describe you have not yet been created?When the alphabet lacks the very letters?How can it be my fault when your loveliness only growsby the time I reach for pen and paper?Tell me how I am at faultwhen I am only a beginner in poemsand you are exquisite poetry?To write you in words is to put a veil upon you.Why must I writewhen I can kiss you instead?

Marvellous!" he repeated, looking up at me. "Look! The beauty--but that is nothing--look at the accuracy, the harmony. And so fragile! And so strong! And so exact! This is Nature--the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so--and every blade of grass stands so--and the mighty Kosmos il perfect equilibrium produces--this. This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature--the great artist.

When beauty lives in the heart, it doesn__ need to show up anywhere else.

Not lovelier. But a different kind of loveliness. There are so many kinds of loveliness.

It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

There was no denying it. Boys grabbed him. Their loveliness tore him apart. The world was a wonder after all.

He embraces all things that are lovely: he seals up the sum of all loveliness. Things that shine as single stars with a particular glory, all meet in Christ as a glorious constellation. Col. 1:19, "It pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell." Cast your eyes among all created beings, survey the universe: you will observe strength in one, beauty in a second, faithfulness in a third, wisdom in a fourth; but you shall find none excelling in them all as Christ does. Bread has one quality, water another, raiment another, medicine another; but none has them all in itself as Christ does. He is bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, a garment to the naked, healing to the wounded; and whatever a soul can desire is found in him, 1 Cor. 1:30

Not pretty exactly, but gleaming with the loveliness of youth.