Learning to Find Beauty
The other day Emma saw a man walking down the side of the road. He was obviously homeless or struggling, the sort of person most of us generally fail to notice at all. "Mommy," she said. "I see a man. By the road." "Oh yea?" I replied. And with all the love and compassion that a 2-year-old can muster she said from the back seat, "Yes. He's beautiful." _____________ In graduate school I used to go to the Norton Simon art museum and sit for a while in front of one of my favorite paintings. They had a wonderful collection of Monet, Van Gogh, and Renoir, but this one was by an artist I didn't know. It depicted a vagrant, or a homeless man, with some rotten fruit. It was beautiful. The painter had taken something that is so often looked over and made it into a masterpiece. I bought a print and hung it in my office for a long time to remind myself to find beauty in the things and people that many only see as problematic or unfixable. I