For Our Eyes Only

There is a poem I remember every spring, one of my very favorites. And it encapsulates the season so beautifully to me. 

Reading it makes me notice the smaller and gentler signs of spring. The joy I feel when I see new flowers springing up from the earth, yes. But also the relief I feel when old favorites from my garden come back. Losing sight of them over winter is like sending a loved one off to war, hoping against hope that I'll see them again after the bleak time is over. Our beloved hawthorn tree in the back yard had us terrified last autumn that she might be dying when we found tiny mushrooms growing on some of her branches. (An arborist assured us she will be fine.) So this spring, as I see tiny green buds on her branches giving way to delicate and minuscule new green leaves, my heart fills with so much hope and comfort. It is almost too much to bear.

Spring is a season of fragile beauties. Innocent new stems and buds tremble and sway in the winds and rain. And as I see a hillside of trees fogged with subtle new verdant color, or stunning periwinkle clouds on the horizon, I am reminded how wonderful it is that some of the most exquisite visions of the world are for our eyes only. "Oh, this is so wonderful," we might say to ourselves, as we lift our camera to capture what we see. But it doesn't work. The picture is flat and uninspiring. The magic so delicate, no camera can capture it like the human eye can. 

Our wondrous brains also have the capacity to see the incredible in vistas where we have to filter out the extraneous. As I drove through a picturesque nearby college town this morning, my eyes totally forgot about the orange construction barrels on the street corners and marvelled at the beautiful houses already decorated with vibrant flowers. A flower grows in a trash heap, and we focus on that flower, as the garbage seems to not even exist. We see a wondrous owl or raven sitting in a nearby tree, and we marvel at how the sight of it fills our entire heart and eyeview, yet when we lift our phones to capture our experience, we get a blurry smudge. Suddenly we realize this experience that seems so immediate is actually an animal sitting hundreds of feet away from us. 

This is because experiencing beauty isn't just about the visual lens of what is in front of our eyes. Beauty, true beauty, works on all of our senses, and plays on our core, deep, intrinsic and base emotions. Not to get too far off topic, but this is why when I call myself an aesthete, it's not because I think I have a better grasp on what beauty is than anyone else does. It's because I find near-religious euphoria in the feeling something truly beautiful can give. An experience so beautiful it fills me up to the brim to the point where I feel giddy or overwhelmed. When my eyes brim over as I bubble forth with laughter at the same time, feeling so many emotions I don't know what to do with them all. 

Sometimes, seeing something beautiful fills us up, all of our sharp edges and broken pieces, until we simply cannot believe that something so capable of making us feel like there's nothing else in the world...could possibly be so small or so ephemeral that it can't be captured in photos or film. But that's how life is. Just like it's so easy to forget to look for the small magics. Just like it's so easy to forget memories we thought we would keep forever. Some of life's most exquisite beauties, like the tiny green leaves "unfurling..like an open palm," are meant to only be experienced once, by our eyes alone, in a singular moment. 

So by all means, experience it. Put down those phones. Close your eyes and then open them again. Drop your defenses. And truly feel the breeze and the smells of petrichor after spring rains and the sight of a day so green after thunderstorms that you think you will forever picture this moment when you hear the word "green." Don't waste a single moment trying to capture wild delicate beauty. The clouds will shift. The blooms will fade. The bracken will grow too thick for you to reach this part of the forest again. And this singular moment will become a memory that will slowly fade and soften. So let it blaze fire bright in this moment. Perhaps then it will fade away to pastel memory a little slower. And with some beauties, that's all we can possibly hope for.