Beauty Witness

I am sole witness to a million little events of beauty every day but I don’t see them. Worse yet, in my ineptitude at witnessing beauty, I miss the opportunity to participate in it. Is beauty compromised because I experience it as annoyance or pain instead of a graceful or stunning moment?


I’m not a fan of winter and didn’t particularly appreciate SnowKahuna this year. A few days after the big snowfall, I was at work when I heard familiar coo-hooing. When I looked out the work-place window and saw nothing, I thought of home in Alabama where my mother has a bird clock that chimes 12 different birdsongs. At 7’oclock there is a mourning dove. I know mourning doves are out there; I can hear them. I’m wishing, like at home, I had a b-b gun and a clear shot; but the windows are sealed and I don’t have a b-b- gun. The coo-hooing continues. Later, I walk by the window again and there the two doves sit on a reservoir tank cuddling and preening each other. I think, “They can have all the love action they want if they’ll just shut up.”

I should be horrified at my reaction to the beauty I just witnessed. Why can’t I appreciate it as a grace-filled announcement? After all, the birds are sensing spring and singing its praises. What isn’t praise-worthy about spring? I should be humbled at the invitation to participate as their chosen audience member, their sole eyewitness.

However, I don’t want to hear them. Even as much as I hate winter and long for spring, I would prefer they kept their heartfelt song to themselves. I can experience spring without their annoying song. When spring arrives, I can see its sunrise, pick its flowers, and touch my feet to its cool grass. I don’t need to get my heart involved to appreciate beauty.

Helen Keller would disagree with me. She said, “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched but must be felt with the heart.”

She is a remarkable witness for beauty. I, on the other hand, am a poor student of the beautiful. When seen only through my narrow perspective lens, beauty is often superimposed onto the retina of my heart as irritation or pain.

My violent inclination toward the mourning doves makes me a little ashamed. I know better because I had a chance to learn about being a beauty witness on a very long walk.

Several years ago, I walked across Spain on a pilgrim trail called the Camino de Santiago.

This trail was no respecter of persons. I watched 60 year old men and women pass me on the trail and walk kilometers farther than me on a daily basis. I watched as the Camino all but had a professional soccer player crawling on his knees at the end of each day’s walk.

I can give you a firsthand account of the pain, the stress and the exhaustion of the trip. I know because I was there, an eyewitness to it every day.

I may have known I was in good shape before I left for Spain, but I didn’t witness that fact on the Camino. Within three days of a five week journey, an old ankle injury returned with sometimes immobilizing pain; it also caused tendonitis to flare up in my knee. On top of that, it rained the first few days of the trip, constant and heavy; it was cold. In the third week, on Easter in Burgos, it snowed. I won’t tell you again what my least favorite season is but I will confess that I was unable to foster a good attitude.

One of the men that I met was from Norway. He had two walking poles and he hiked much faster than I could ever dream of moving. He was at least 10 years older than me with a steady job and family.

While I struggled, he embraced. He told me that he did the trail every couple of years. Every time he returned home after walking it, he couldn’t watch TV or read the papers, because he couldn’t stand the noise. He was a remarkable witness for the escape that the trail offered. His experience of the trail was so deep that he took it back home with him.

I couldn’t see anything beyond cold and pain.

Does that make the trail painful? Do I trade solace for irritation at less than ideal temperatures? And the beauty, where was it when I was there?

When I returned from Spain, one thing I could say about the trip was that it was stressful. I brought that stress back with me which manifested itself in nightmares for over a year. I was such a witness to long days of pain that I also returned with a steady, slow pace full of a peaceful sense of what I can do and what I can’t do. I can recall brief moments of beauty.

However, I’m afraid that I missed most of the beauty. I looked toward the end of each day for rest and hopefully a clean bed but I rarely looked to the horizon. There were sunsets every day, but until the last week of a five week trip, I never took the time to see. I know beauty was there and I know I missed it.

That seems to be a travesty that I practice over and over. I practice embracing the irritation, grasping for the negative instead of welcoming the beautiful. I overload myself with a burden of pain rather than the search for beauty.

What do I have to gain from embracing the negative instead of basking in the beautiful?

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as an eyewitness to it I am rather inept, even dumb. I certainly don’t deserve the invitation by a couple of doves to hear their song in praise of spring.

There is a quote from a famous entertainer that comes to mind. And though I probably misrepresent the intention her quote, I can’t help but think that it must apply. This rather beautiful pig seems to have one up on me. I sure, if she could, Miss Piggy would say: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."