Tag: beauty

Posted in Thoughts from Life

My View

Posted on by Ann B. Hibbard

I can see irises through my office window.

When we moved here, I transplanted just over a dozen of my iris bulbs. At our previous home, they were planted in a nice little circle around a large oak in the front yard. The new home also had a spot in the front yard where flowers could easily be planted around a tree, and that tree happened to be right outside the office window. Perfect location!

The catch was that the bulbs didn’t bloom. I didn’t really expect blooms the first year after we moved, one full year after transplanting, although I knew it was possible. But I did kind of expect them the second year. So, I was disappointed when there were no blooms at all. The third year, when I began seeing irises elsewhere around the community, I went out to check my own. Just leaves. Not even a sign of stalks growing.

Less than two weeks later, I suddenly had buds on three of plants! Then buds showed up on two more plants! Although it was still fewer than half of the transplanted bulbs, those five began to produce abundantly, providing wave after wave of beauty.

And the best part was that I could see them from my window. Every time I got up from my desk or passed through the room, the irises were there to make me smile.

It sounds perfect, doesn’t it? A beautiful view from my window! But what if I told you it was incomplete?

You see, only four of the five sets of blooms can be seen from my window. The fifth one is behind the tree.

But there’s more. My fledgling hydrangea bush is off to one side of the porch, out of sight from the window. It is just starting to produce color, pink this year instead of the blue it boasted when we bought it last year. I have to make sure to step outside if I want to enjoy the new growth. My Norfolk pine, the one bought years ago as a small living Christmas tree for our bedroom, comes inside during the cold winter months. During that season, I can easily see it on its high perch, safe and sound from cat attacks. But as soon as the overnight temperatures rise enough each spring, I move the large pot to a spot right beside the front door where it will be able to enjoy the humid warmth and get the right amount of sunlight. It sits just out of sight between the office window and the front door, along with the potted blueberry and elderberry bushes lined up on either side of it.

I’m honestly horrible at growing things, and more plants die at my hand than survive. But these are growing, and it’s delightful to see them. But in order to do so, I have to actually step outside. I can’t enjoy their beauty through the window like I can most of the irises.

Oh, and have I mentioned the peach trees? This is their first year to be mature enough to produce, and they are covered in maturing peaches. Not only can I not see them from the window, there is also no way to smell them from inside. The peach smell has been glorious from the moment those beautiful buds first began to swell and produce fruit! I just have to step outside the door to see and smell and enjoy.

Life is beautiful in the same way, isn’t it? God gives us so much to see from right where we are. It’s glorious and it’s nourishing. But do we catch the fact that it’s also incomplete?

God has given us the incredibly nourishment of our immediate families, our work and social spaces, and our church home. There is so much to see and smell and taste and touch in those spaces. It can be so very nourishing and powerful.

But as beautiful as life is in the immediate spaces God has created for us, if we don’t look further, we’ll miss the fuller and more powerful beauty. If we don’t step out of our comfortable spaces into the wider world, we’ll lack an understanding of how God creates beauty in the most unexpected ways. We’ll miss the smells and sights and visions of His expansive kingdom. We’ll miss the understanding that there is beauty beyond our wildest imaginations, beauty that will be fully revealed when we cross the boundary between temporary and eternal.

My view from my office window is precious and nourishing. But stepping into my yard gives me much more. Will we step out and see the greater Kingdom beauty that exists all around us?

Posted in Faith Nuggets, Thoughts from Life

On Puzzles and Noticing

Posted on by Ann B. Hibbard

I love puzzles. Fortunately for me, I also have a daughter who enjoys puzzles, maybe even more than I do! Over the years, we’ve loved sitting down to puzzles together, working on them for Sabbath rest or in stolen moments here and there.

The summer before she headed off to college, we started a rather complex puzzle. With 1500 pieces, it wasn’t an abnormally sized puzzle for us. We frequently tackle 1000-piece puzzles without a second thought, and a 500-piece puzzle isn’t even really a challenge at all. So, there wasn’t anything extraordinary about this 1500-piece puzzle in its size.

It was the image itself that caused us to wonder about our sanity as we dove in. This particular puzzle was constellations. A dark background covered in tiny words and dots and details. Several times I wondered if my eyes weren’t just a bit too old for this heavily detailed puzzle.

We started the puzzled over the summer. Then my daughter headed off to college. I tackled a couple of things here and there — parts that I knew wouldn’t be too challenging because I could see the patterns easily. But I didn’t make a lot of progress.

My daughter came home for Christmas, and we decided to spend some time puzzling. That first day back on the “job” I noticed something I had never seen before, even after months of having the puzzle out. I noticed blue lines and patterns connecting the stars in the middle of the puzzle. Images. Patterns. Designs with coherent flow.

I had expected the center to be almost impossible to figure out systematically because of the teeny tiny dots and numbers. But what I found was a series of patterns that would make the puzzle much more easy to solve. Connection points. Anchors.

These had been there all along, I just hadn’t noticed them.

Oddly enough, I’d just finished a book a few days before that talked about noticing. Sitting patiently with art or other aspects of beauty to observe and gain awareness that a glance — or even a long look — will never provide. The idea of sitting in front of a single painting for minutes, much less hours, seems so very hard to me. And yet, I’ve caught myself lingering at times before a snippet of beauty only to find that I could hardly tear myself away. So much to see and take in that a lifetime couldn’t possibly be enough!

I’ve long argued that we need to approach Scripture this way as well. Sitting with it, reading and rereading it, discovering what we can’t see quickly. This approach was pressed into my heart and mind by a college class. Our professor would hand us a passage and have us list all of our observations. When we felt we’d gleaned all we possibly could, he would tell us to go and do it again. We’d moan and groan, thinking there was nothing else to be seen. We’d get ornery and list blatantly obvious, seemingly ridiculous details, only to discover that those details would awaken us to a whole list of things we’d missed before.

In recent years, this concept of lingering and observing that once was as natural as breathing has become foreign to me. In some ways, I’ve been afraid to linger because lingering isn’t always happy. Sometimes it’s simply overwhelming, producing unexplained emotions that leave me with more questions than answers. Lingering can mean dealing with painful things. Things that I can’t fix. Things that only hurt.

Little observances have been awakening my heart. A lakeside sunrise so incredibly beautiful that I couldn’t bear to pull my eyes away. A pattern than stirred thoughts and made me want to create despite the fact that art is not in any way a gifting of mine. A puzzle that seemed so challenging because of all of its apparent sameness, only to reveal itself to be full of patterns and nuances that, once discovered, made it almost easy to complete.

Noticing stirs thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness stirs emotions. Emotions stir connection. And connection breathes life back into parts of me that have been, at best, dormant and, at worst, dead.

Fortunately for me, I serve a Lord, Savior, and Master who not only awakens the dormant but can actually bring the dead back to life.

Sometimes with something as simple as a puzzle.