Saturday Morning Beautiful

Encountering Beauty in Ordinary Places

“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting—a wayside sacrament.  Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”

                                  Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”

                                  John Muir

         Most Saturday mornings this summer, I volunteer at the Pepper Place Farmer’s Market near my home.  It is a beehive of activity in the inner city.  This summer in particular, there are droves of enormously pregnant women, gaggle of children in tow, pushing strollers with big wheels and double occupancy.  Young and old, kempt and messy, all manner of folks troll the stalls squeezing tomatoes, parting the husks of corn to view the pale yellow pearls inside, while eating homemade sausage biscuits from paper wrappers.  In one corner of the market, a blue-grass band plays and in another, chefs instruct devotees on their particular cuisine.  The stalls, themselves, are beautiful to behold with piles of red tomatoes, buckets of zinnias and sunflowers, peaches just at the peak of juiciness, watermelons, cantaloupes, and baskets of beans, peas, squash and purple eggplant.  My eyes drink in the beauty and bounty and remember all the gardens of my own life. 

         Gardens are labor intensive.  The eyes of the farm families, who have been on the hard concrete of this parking lot since five a.m., show quiet fatigue.  This is their busy season, the one they work for all year, and they’re glad the crowd is big, but they are tired.  They too are beautiful, with their leathery brown skin, rugged hands and permanent sun-squint.  They must look at the soft bellies of city dwellers and wonder what we were doing when they were picking corn at three o’clock in the morning, and packing their trucks for the drive into town by four.  They are there with their children, too—beefy boys with buzz-cuts, girls in shorts and pony-tails. I picture these kids sleeping in the truck on the trip into town and even now, looking only half alert as they work along side their parents.  This is their life.  I wonder how many of them will become farmers. 

         Beauty is all around us if we look for it, and beauty in all its forms, gives life texture and substance.  Whether it is found in a lovely face, a child’s bouncing curls, a sunset, a summer rain, or a farmer’s market, it is a gift to be cherished.

In the spirit,
Jane