A New Kind of Beauty

So, you've probably heard but, the year ended recently.  One more dizzyingly fast lap around the sun; one more mark notched into the stone of life. 

Last year I made a goal to harvest the beauty around me.  I spent the whole year looking, and seeing, and capturing what I could in as many photos as it took.  I gathered and edited and combined those pictures and I posted them here (more or less monthly) so I could always remember what I found in my year of harvesting beauty.   

It was easy at first.  Reeeeeeeeeeeeeally easy.  At the end of those early months it would pain me to have to whittle down all of those beautiful beach pictures to my 31 favorite.  But recently it's been much harder and it feels like my fingernails are scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with 31 that even make the cut. 

I anticipated this.  But even with that anticipation, it has surprised me how much I miss that easy beauty.    

I feel lucky that I started searching for beauty when it was easy and abundant--- because all of that positive reinforcement helped turn that Searching-For-Beauty frame of mind into a habit.  And now, even though it's rather discouraging sometimes, I find myself consistently looking for and noticing The Beautiful around me. And the remarkable thing is that, even though I feel I'm always scraping the bottom of the barrel, I still have never come up empty handed.

And that, in and of itself, is beautiful to me.  

  

I've loved working in this goal.  It has changed me, ever so slightly, into a better person. And I most certainly am renewing my contract with it.  But just as life changes and grows, I think it's time to shift my focus a bit.  Instead of searching for the visual beauty in my days and capturing them in pictures, I want to search now for the beautiful moments instead, and I want to capture them in words.  

Because I love my life.  I love the people in my life.  I love the stories in my life and the feelings in my life. And I want noticing and harvesting those to become the new habit.    

And I'm hoping to find that, just as the Visual Beauty was easy and abundant on the beaches of Miami, the Beautiful Moments are here in the desert.