The heav’ns declare God’s glory, the skies His work proclaim!
From day to day and night by night they shout His glorious Name!
No speech, no words, no voice is heard, yet all across the earth
the lines of His all-present Word make known His holy worth.
– Psalm 19.1-3; sung to the tune of “Beneath the Cross of Jesus”
Last winter was no disappointment for those of us who love snow. From the week before Christmas through most of March, snow was on the ground here in northern Vermont. At its height, the snow lay six to eighteen inches deep for nearly three months.
Two snowplow teams manage the snow removal in our community. The city truck clears the roads while the HOA truck does the driveways. Both trucks push the snow into the circle in the center of our cul-de-sac, where a single maple rests unperturbed throughout the winter. Three “No Parking” signs stand as sentinels for the circle, warning drivers not to encroach on the maple’s slumber (or its beauty during the rest of the year).
Throughout this past winter, the plows piled the snow higher than before, so that the circle became a range of ice mounds six feet tall, covering the “No Parking” signs. This snow was piled so high that the trucks forgot—or paid no attention to—where the signs stood watch. Each was struck, bent, twisted, and torn by snowplow blades. One fought back, however, tearing a caution light from one of the plows.
The maple tree is further guarded by a mine field of stones with jagged edges. Dogs walk on them reluctantly, and they discourage human traffic. A green belt of wildflowers and grasses populates the outer three or four feet of the circle—which is around ten yards in diameter—from late spring to late fall.
This winter the snowplows were ruthless in shaving off the remaining greenery as they labored to make more room for snow. When April arrived, we could see that the green belt had been graded, gouged, gutted, and scraped clean. Only the mud and twisted signs remained. I was reminded of lines from Hopkins:
And all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell…
But this was not the first rodeo for these hardy plants. As the leaves began to emerge on the maple, rousing from its sleep, a shade of green seeped into its wonted place around the edge of the cul-de-sac, heralding the victorious return of the wild flowers and reminding me of the resilience of beauty.
First to appear were the pearl worts. Less than an inch tall, and sporting a star-shaped blossom white as pearl and small as your pinky fingernail, these little beauties are like children on Christmas morning, up before everyone else and heralding the beginning of a happy day. They emerged in patches on the northeastern edge of the circle, like lanterns showing the way out of the darkness beneath into the light of spring.
Their delicate star-shaped petals would last a month before giving way to the meddicks. The meddicks appeared together, as if on cue, small, clover-like leaves rapidly becoming larger, hugging the ground at around 2 inches before their yellow, spherical flowers formed. Those golden globes and sun-lapping leaves first showed up on the southern and eastern sides of the circle, a thick mass which grew to become a carpet of cushiony beauty all around. Simultaneously, a patch of meddicks appeared like a clamoring crowd around the trunk of the maple, dodging stone mines to rejoice with the maple at the onset of spring.
Within the meddicks, and throughout their bustling community, knot weeds stood up. Only leafy at first, soon their stalks appeared and upon these a small bulbous flower, shades of pink, and reminding me of the jingle bells a percussionist shakes at Christmas time. Before long, they were the tallest flower in the circle, towering six to eight inches, touting their leaves and bells as if to insist that they are not weeds at all.
Sand spurrey popped up in patches around the western edge of the circle, a rosy complement to the pearly worts, sporting a light pink star-shaped flower which, because the patch bloomed as one, about an inch high, offered a delightful complement to the growing community of creation’s beauty. Their flowers anticipated the centauries, which would come later, and feature a larger, brighter pink star with a golden sun center. They will thrive throughout the summer on the sandy western edge of the circle.
Last—at least as far as my identifications have proceeded—the American aster will emerge on the north side of the circle and explode its beauty like a bursting sun well into the fall. All these little glories intertwine with a variety of grasses and other greenery which, like the flowers, are undaunted by snow and rough treatment. By the end of June, the green belt had fully recovered and was flourishing.
Here in this battered and torn landscape—which also serves as the bathroom for the neighborhood dogs—resilient beauty returns every spring, lasting throughout the summer, anticipating the grander display of the maple and its confrères when the wildflowers pass the baton to them in October. They remind me, year after year, not to give up on beauty.
Clockwise from 1:00, pearl worts, meddicks, knotweed, sand spurrey, century, American aster.
Beauty is everywhere. While it’s lovely and varied right under our feet, as in the green belt of our circle, it is even grander and more glorious all around and above us. We get so used to the beauty assembling around us every day—the growth tips of a conifer, the rich palette of natural colors, the majesty of a cumulus cloud, the wonder of the night sky, the delicate curve of a leg of furniture, the smile of a neighbor, the artistry and order of a snowplow at work, the touch of a loved one, the laughter of a child—that we become blind to it.
We take beauty for granted, yet it keeps coming at us in an endless display of divine grace and power, inviting us, as C. S. Lewis wrote, not merely to see beauty but to enter into it, to share in its defining features and powers, to become more mindful of the beauty of our world, and to be more beautiful ourselves.
King David said that, if he had his way, he would do one thing only: meditate on the beauty of the LORD (Psalm 27:4). David and other of the psalmists knew that God’s beauty is everywhere (Psalms 19:1-5; 146:1-7), and they encourage us to pay attention to it (Psalms 90:17; 96:1-6). God, they insisted, is the Perfection of all beauty (Psalm 50:2); to see beauty is thus to glimpse God, the Creator of all beauty.
The beauty of our world can keep us in touch with God. It provides a steady stream of mostly small encounters to remind, provoke, and delight, and to lead us to give thanks to our beautiful God. The more attentive we are to the beauty around us, the more we will ponder its message and appreciate its resilience. We are never far from beauty. The beauty of our world invites us to get in step and let the beauty of God radiate through all our thoughts, words, and deeds. And Hopkins reminds us of how this ultimately works:
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
The creation, and innumerable aspects of our culture and everyday life, call on us not to give up on beauty. We may be battered by nagging issues or tasks, harassed by agendas and deadlines, harried by countless details, bent and broken by a bent and broken world. But the resilient beauty around us calls us to endure, to shine, to brighten the world of our neighbors with all the beauty we can muster in everything we do.
The more we pause to appreciate the beauty around us, to see in people and things those divinely-bestowed features that reveal the work of a beautiful Creator, the more that beauty can refract through us. The beauty we express may go ignored, but that does not excuse us from nurturing and displaying it every way we can. Maybe it’s only as small as a pearl wort, but noting and displaying beauty will satisfy a deep purpose in our soul and bear witness to the resilient beauty of the world and its Creator.
Title Image Credit: Joaquín Sorolla, “Valencian Fishermen” (1895)
