Sunday, December 11, 2011

You are Beautiful

There was another piece of art in the Nature Unframed exhibit at the Morton Arboretum that really struck me.

Most of the pieces of art were in a centrally located area, so I walked around to see all of them.  This piece of art was, I think, the biggest.  You probably could have seen it from an airplane.


This is a wonderful message.  There are so many people out there who need to hear this message.  But I wasn’t terribly impressed by this piece of art.  It was just some really big letters- although still a good message.

I moved on to look at other art pieces.  And then later I rode my bike past this piece of art from a different route than I had walked past it.  At first I thought it might be a different piece of art because it was so different and striking.


From the other direction the letters were yellow- a beautiful bright, brilliant yellow. The first time I looked at this piece of art, I hadn’t given it enough of a chance- I dismissed the white letters as “nothing special” and hadn’t taken the time to look at it more deeply, to look at it from another perspective.

Sometimes we need to look at something from a different angle (figuratively or literally).  Sometimes we don’t see the beauty in something because we are looking at it the wrong way.  Or sometimes we don’t look at it long enough.  Or maybe we don’t look at it deeply enough.  Sometimes we dismiss people outright because we don’t take the time to look for the good in them or we just let any small fault override any potential good.  Sometimes a situation frustrates us because it seems all bad when we don’t take the time to look for the good.  Perhaps this is about thinking about the glass as being half full rather than half empty.  But in the end I think we all have to give everyone and everything in our lives a chance before we judge, a chance to see the good, a chance to see the beautiful.