Beauty Is

In an effort to keep a bal­anced life, Vitaliy and I took a trip this week­end to Tahoe. It was an abnor­mally cold week­end there, but it was absolutely per­fect for us. We enjoyed sweet moments with friends, deli­cious home-cooked meals, snug­gling up by the fire­place, and the peace­ful­ness of the great outdoors.

On our way home, we started read­ing Cre­ative Authen­tic­ity by Ian Roberts. This is what we typ­i­cally do on road trips. Vitaliy dri­ves and I read books out loud. And in between read­ing, we dis­cuss, we chal­lenge each other, and then we dream.

In the mid­dle of the first chap­ter, which was a dis­cus­sion of beauty, we came across this,

“In the face of beauty, we are silenced, because beauty expresses silence. In lav­ish­ing atten­tion on the object of the art­work, the con­scious­ness of the artist can touch some­thing divine, some tran­scen­den­tal qual­ity, and that tran­scen­dent ele­ment now resides in the art­work. How do we know it? We feel it. We expe­ri­ence it. Our heart responds to the sub­lime qual­ity the artist infused into the work.”

In the mid­dle of dis­cussing beauty and reflect­ing on what the author had to say, we looked up and saw a lit­tle patch of light which had a rain­bow reflec­tion to it. I pointed it out to Vitaliy because I had never seen any­thing like it. How­ever, as we con­tin­ued dri­ving, an entire rain­bow was painted onto the sky right before our eyes. Imme­di­ately, we could feel that sub­lime qual­ity of beauty dis­cussed in the book. We were humbly reminded that there is no greater source, to learn and under­stand beauty from, than the Cre­ator Himself.

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Here are a cou­ple other works of art that belong to Him that we got to enjoy this weekend.