Where to Find Beauty

"If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere." - Laura Ingalls Wilder

If you’ve recently lost touch with beauty, or you don’t already know what beauty is, the answer lies in nature. Beauty is nature. Nature itself is beauty. Beauty is everything that is crafted by the hands of the Divine – frogs happily jumping in the rain, the wind that caresses your face, flowering weeds beside the road, and even your own bodily form. Beauty is a broad concept that cannot be defined by a single sentence. Beauty is love; it is divine, pleasing, joyful, and spiritual – all of which are found in nature. Therefore, when someone asks me what beauty is, I say that the answer is best portrayed by nature.

In these times where the world is dominated by technology, we lose touch with ourselves and with each other. There is less intimacy as we usually talk to our friends online instead of spending more time in person, looking into each other’s eyes, and hearing their tinkling laughter. The academes and our jobs typically take up most of our time, leaving us almost unable to hear our own thoughts and unable to feel how the earth is.  And because we are almost living in an artificial, virtual, and robotic world, we now have a skewed idea of beauty. Our idea of beauty is manipulated by capitalism. Our present idea of beauty ironically makes us all feel bad about ourselves – which is not the aim of true beauty. True beauty will always make us feel good. Therefore, when the media shows us “beauty standards,” these are often lies.

When we take time to be present in nature and observe, we see that every single thing that makes up Mother Earth adds up to her beauty in its own unique way. A grasshopper would just happily leap about and would never feel envy for a fish because it is not interested in swimming. A bee would never steal a lion’s throne as it loves its own job of going from flower to flower and making honey. Even trees are content in sheltering animals from the storm, producing oxygen, and preventing floods. Every single creature has a perfect form and role to play. Everything in nature has value and contribution to the world, not by adhering to some kind of “standards,” but by being themselves. As we are all wonderfully made by the Divine, so we shall trust our own special designs. There is no such thing as ugliness except for evil. Therefore, everything and everyone is beautiful.

Nature also connects us to our hearts. When we finally learn how to connect more with our hearts than with our minds, then we would realize that the heart recognizes beauty more than the eyes. It is your heart that sees the beauty in your wrinkled grandma as she hands you a warm glass of milk, it is your heart that sees the beauty in your dog that always seeks for your company, and it is your heart that sees the beauty of a withered rose who has fulfilled its job of gracing the surroundings with its loveliness. Nature, together with our hearts, will always tell us the truth of what beauty really is.