The Beauty That Was Already There

The Beauty That Was Already There 

Lake Glenville is 3,200 feet above sea level.

That’s a lot of water to have floating in the air.

It’s a big, deep, man-made lake, more than half a mile across in places. I keep imagining a really cold winter, the entire lake frozen solid from top to bottom, and somehow picking up that enormous ice cube and putting it on top of two Empire State Buildings stacked one on top of the other.

That’s what it feels like.

I’m sitting on a lake half a mile up in the air, balanced on the Earth.

Yesterday morning I walked down from the top deck toward the water. Ten feet lower, a different view. Another ten feet, another view. The lake gradually became flatter as I descended.

For a moment I forgot I was hanging out over the edge of the Earth.

And then I thought:

Wherever I am on Earth, isn’t it the edge?

Later I sat on the boat to meditate.

The sun was just beginning to rise above the trees. The top edge of it was visible, with light coming through the branches.

I began to notice the edges of my own vision, almost as if I were looking through binoculars.

The boat against the water.

Sunlight sparkling on the ripples.

Mist rising across the lake.

Boats and ducks in the distance.

Every few seconds, another painting.

And then I began thinking about beauty.

The lake borrows beauty from the sunlight.

The trees borrow it.

The ripples break it into moving pieces.

The mist softens it.

None of them creates it alone. Beauty appears in the joining—the way the same sunlight is reflected differently by everything it touches, and then somehow becomes something I see as beautiful.

Then I closed my eyes.

The lake disappeared.

The boats, the ducks, the sun, the mist—all gone.

Apparently, the eyelids are remarkably efficient curtains.

And then sound became the lake.

The waterfall across the finger of the lake was always there. Not overpowering. Just present.

A ripple bumped against the dock.

A bird chirped.

There was a little tinnitus and, somewhere in the background, the sound of Om.

I noticed the pressure of my back against the seat and my feet on the boat.

Sight.

Sound.

Touch.

Each with its own tone.

And then I realized that the waterfall had been there the entire time.

I simply hadn’t been listening to it.

Perhaps beauty is like that.

The lake, the trees, the sunlight, and the ripples become a catalyst. They bring something forward in me that I call beauty.

But perhaps they don’t create it.

Perhaps they reveal it.

And perhaps the beauty inside is like the waterfall.

It is already there.

Sometimes the world becomes beautiful enough to make us notice.