The Fragile Beauties

I am sorry I've been so silent of late, but if you saw my hypothetical calender which has included a good friend's wedding and 5 family birthdays in one month, the launching of my literary-themed online shop called The Warren, a re-inspiration for my writing, lots of reading, and the cranking-up of the family school-year, you'd realize there really has been very little time to devote to blogging. Along with this craziness has been lots of thinking, on my part. I don't know why, but I've been in a thoughtful frame of mind recently; such spasms strike me now and again and I think Plato himself would be rather proud of my philosophizing abilities now and then. ;)

From the thinking has sprung a little thing that I am Being Aware Of that I call The Fragile Beauties. I guess you could say that this Thing is like 1,000 Gifts, or even the book Sarah got for her birthday: Cold Tangerines. But The Fragile Beauties trend began for me when I would find certain pictures on Pinterest that had no place on any of the rest of my boards, but that I could not ignore. Pins that captured the little pieces of everyday life that I try to remember to notice. Or things that I've always wished I had a macro-lense to be able to photograph. Things like this:

 

 I haven't read Cold Tangerines , but I know that my Fragile Beauties are a bit less broad a list than 1,000 Gifts. Where the latter paints a broader picture to be grateful for, The Fragile Beauties are the strictly aesthetic blessings. I'm a visual, touchy, feeling, all-five-senses-roaring girl. So I love to notice the beautiful things here on earth that we've been given in abundance. The beauties that are gifts but oh so fragile because they won't last. (Perhaps we'll have even better ones in Heaven?)

Psalm 103:15 says:

"As for man, his days are like grass;

as the flower of the field, so he flourishes

for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,

and its place remembers it no more."

Fragility. Humanity. Earth-ness. It's all passing, and little of it will last, huh? But when I cared to think about the fragility a bit deeper, I saw a thing I usually pass over when reading those verses. Over in Mattew 6:28-29:

"...Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

So you see, man's existence on earth might be a little blinkity-thing, but it's still a thing, for a while at least, we flourish as those self-same lilies, and Jesus acknowledges the lilies are beautiful. We're also told that "Every good and perfect gift is from above", and that everything God does is to His glory. So I'm sitting here thinking:

"Gosh; The Fragile Beauties. One life to find them in. My Lover who delights to watch me notice: ...um...game on."

 I'm finding The Fragile Beauties, and I'm marking them mentally, posting them on Instagram (username: heirloomrosebud) with the hashtag: #thefragilebeauties, pinning them on Pinterest, and gathering in the beauty strewn about that so many people pass by. I'm pointing it out to other people, smiling over it myself, thanking God whenever I catch one of those fleeting, fading, lovely things, and enjoying every moment.

I hope you'll join me in this. 1,000 Gifts, Cold Tangerines, The Fragile Beauties; whatever you call them, let's go searching.