A Brighter Discontent

Pain of Beauty It is a painful thing to look upon a crisp sunrise, the sky a watercolour painting of corals and greys, to think of how beautiful it is, only then to realize that it is the beginning of the end, it will not be like this ever again. everything temporal, changing, waning, and yet, how lovely it has shone just for you. Beauty hurts, like love, it flickers, it grows and fades; it soars on the wings of eagles, it swells like a wave ready to crash upon a stony beach, it is that sound of the strings in a symphony; the crescendo hits and the audience is carried in a rapture of jubilations – uplifting, unfurling, twisting, turning- an expensive perfume spilt across the table, an operatic note echoing in the cathedral, a snowflake melting in the palm of your hand. The child looks up into his grandfather’s face and asks the timeless question And in response the grandfather looks up into the heavens and his heart echoes: Why are the most beautiful and worthwhile things in life so momentary? As I peer into the pool of theory, I see a reflective proposal found in history of our humanity. It was never intended to be this way, the flowers of Eden would have bloomed for eternity- the birds would have sung till no end- When I see a sunrise, the aurora borealis, a newborn baby, the kiss of an elderly couple, I see the presence of a severe mercy, The mercy poured out on all humanity at the cost of great severity. All that the brain is - what a masterful thing That holds, recalls, proposes, surmises, dictates through billions of cells- that saves us from insanity by allowing us to forget or forgo the realization that we will not pass this way again, that the flowers will fade, the sun will set, the house will crumble with age like our loved ones... And so the irony of living in a world of paraded ignorance Is that we are saved by the temporal beauty in our world. We search it out, we spend days upon days creating it, all in efforts to make our time here worthwhile. Meanwhile we are flabbergasted when beauty surprises us – pull out the camera, drop everything, and stand amazed – something that we never had to work towards has made the heart skip a beat! Living on the tip of emotion, inviting Death, Divorce, and Demise over for tea. We are granted eyes to see the extraordinary in the humdrum of the day to day. If life in all its brashness and absurdities can uplift the soul, I can see beauty as the result of a painful mercy: the nectar, the ash, the frost. The blink of life… Beauty is the smack across the face – it is a briefly painful experience, And we are suddenly awakened to unearthly glory.