There is beauty all around

I drove to Canmore yesterday to give a talk at the high school on women and violence and homelessness. After a couple of invigorating presentations filled with great questions, dynamic dialogue and young minds searching for understanding, I got back into my car and began the 45 minute drive home.

It was a picture perfect, rocky mountain high kind of day for a drive. Clear blue sky soaring into forever, snowcapped peaks straining to touch the skies and ice covered lakes breaking into spring thaw. As I drove eastward, the mountains receded behind me giving way to sprawling ranchlands and rolling foothills. Horses gamboled in the springlike air, hawks soared on updrafts and gophers poked their heads up out of the earth, scurrying from hole to hole.

What an amazing place I live in.

This morning, I read my eldest daughter, Alexis', blog from Australia. At the end of her descriptive verse about the beauty and wonders she is seeing every day, she wrote, "Hope that everyone who reads this is finding the beauty all around you too!"

There is beauty all around us. No matter if you live on the rolling prairies, at the foot of majestic peaks or the edge of land tumbling into the ocean floor, there is beauty where ever we look.

We just have to open our eyes to the majesty of the world around us, and the magnificence of the world within us.

So often, as I journey through my day, busily getting done what needs doing, putting in place what needs placing and tidying up what needs tidying, I forget to lift my eyes from the ground beneath my feet to witness the world around me. So often, I am so fixated on my task at hand, I lose sight of nature's greater task of creating beauty.

At the end of the block from my house there is an off leash park. Most days, Ellie, Mollie and I trundle down the street to the park and stroll along the ridge, westwards, then eastwards. Depending upon the time of day, the outlook changes. In the morning, if skies are clear, the sun steals across the eastern sky bathing the city skyscape with rosy hues. On cloudy days, like today, the skyscrapers are lit from within, their lights twinkling in the soft morning light. In the evening, the mountains to the west stretch across the horizon like a giant sleeping dragon's back lifted up towards the sky. Clouds tumble overhead, prairie grasses whisper in the wind and traffic snakes its way homeward bound through the quietening streets.

No matter the time of day, there is beauty all around me. I just need to open my senses and breathe in the awe and wonder around me.

I am blessed to live in a place where mountain vistas beckon to the west, and prairie grasses roll into that place where tomorrow will rise in the east.

The question is: Do you see the beauty all around you? Are you open to breathing it in and filling your senses with awe?