What do you find beautiful in the world?

I am at the end of four day stint in which unusual circumstances have me in four different states and another country. Peppered through the busyness of it all I have been involuntarily silenced by some random moments of beauty.

• On Friday, the beige hills in Dumbalk (South Gippsland, VIC) were the backdrop for a new but classically designed Australian house with veranda around most of what we could see. The owners told us the hills were green after the bulk rain in December … the driest January and February on record have scorched them, but the postcard beauty remained if more sober and with a sense of scarring.
• Still on homes … the sprawling old homesteads with outbuildings littered the country side in the warm early light as we flew low into Launceston airport Saturday morning. I regularly forget how beautiful that part of the world is.
• Backyard (or in this case front-yard) cricket on uneven dustbowl grass with kids who could hardly lift the bat and fathers whose competitiveness broke the surface with predictable regularity. Wonderful stuff. (I sport a multicoloured inside knee after the ball jagged to leg … my mind had me flicking it square towards the water tank … what actually happened was the size two bat wacking my knee and the tennis ball undeterred on its way to the keeper.)
• I thoroughly enjoyed John Hirt’s appreciation piece in the current edition of the Monthly. Rare indeed to see published a tribute to someone, in this case Professor Ian Harper, from a writer who is traditionally from a different point on the ideological and political spectrum. There is amazing beauty in authentic grace.
• A text message: I hugged the family as I left again yesterday for what in this season of life is regular business travel. I so didn’t want to be away. I turned on my phone when in transit in Sydney to discover a long text from one of my daughters offering sage-like advice about making the most of my opportunities and thinking about the long term benefits etc etc. It solicited a tear …
• Still in Sydney, this time browsing books. My heart leapt as I saw two in a companion series: 50 Mathematical Ideas You Need to Know, and 50 Physics Ideas You Need to Know. Skimming through them was like walking into an old fashioned ye olde lolly shoppe with favourites and new things to savour, I love the wonders of innovation, patterns and peculiarity that formed the content. Beautiful indeed.
• Pity I couldn’t think of anything beautiful about the steamed fish in8F that arrived midway through this post. … although, the family of five strung out to my left were talking about dinner as only novel holiday travellers do … there is some beauty in that but my emotions in relation to them are more of jealousy at the moment.

Beauty is everywhere. Have a good week.