The Path Toward Beauty (an aesthetic adventure)

When the boys begin to smell like the stale heat, like the salty playground air and the trampled dirt path, then we are on the brink of summer.

When we see snowing pollen fall across the air in sheets, and we close our eyes to save ourselves from sneezes, then we are welcomed to the Georgia summer.

Debra took us across the path, little bridges over quietly running creek water, and around to the cemetery.

She and Eliot ran ahead, hearts beating with fullness, with love for adventure and creation and community.

We discover yet more of the place that we love, that we’re investing our daily lives into.

I told Travis a few weeks ago that fall is my favorite season,

but that late spring and early summer are my favorite time to be with all of my boys, because they crave the outdoors.

Through the tall, towering rock walls and the whispering wind, God speaks life to my husband. In the stillness of a lake, by the riverside, he is fully known.

And Eliot sweeps the landscapes for flowers- blooms of all kinds, for birds and nests and trickling water– for sounds and music that only nature can play for him.

There, he finds God, too.

And Isaiah sits down in the middle of our hike to gather rocks, to pick them up and throw them like a basketball, to exercise his beautiful bent toward athletics and movement.

I told Debra that Eliot was the one who loves aesthetic beauty, but I think it’s really there, in all of us.

And she looked at me as we watched the cemetery’s landscape show itself to us, and she said, “You could write something about this, couldn’t you?”

“So easily,” I said.

The world is full, and beauty is only a hiked path away.

We’re each scanning the horizon for some sign of God, for the chance to hear the wind whisper, This is who you are.

Find your aesthetic adventure.

Pick the flowers.

Throw the rocks.

Hide under the canopy.

Climb the mountain.

Breathe the salty air.

And remember who you’re called to be, in the very deepest part.