Beauty everywhere if we look with fresh eyes

As I pulled out onto the highway from my little neighborhood at dawn I cussed the sun that was rising dead center of the road. It was so bright I feared I would miss an oncoming car.

I thought about how bad that predicament becomes this time of year with the sun setting and rising on the east-west roads. I also thought about all the dirt in the air at this harvest time of year and the combination of the two circumstances.

Then in the next minute I looked west down the street and saw the top of the courthouse building in my hometown absolutely glowing in the morning sun.

That art deco building designed during the WPA era of the 1930s is easily the most distinctive building in town and easily fades into our shortened skyline’s background. It’s always there and we get used to it.

It’s not that I had never seen the building beautifully lit by the sun before, it was just one of the first times I had appreciated the beauty so deeply.

When I lived in Colorado we had a mountain that loomed in the southern skyline to near 13,000 feet from a valley floor of half that elevation. Like other famous mountains, Mt. Sopris was a lady of many moods and an unending variety of looks depending on the light, angle of view, snow depth, the atmosphere and even the foliage.

Some mornings it could be calm in the valley and when you looked up a plume of snow would be blowing from the peak. Other times low clouds or fog would obscure that huge mountain completely or maybe just the very top would be lost in the clouds.

Tucumcari Mountain also had multiple personalities when I lived in that city. Both of those mountains were with me every day just like the Roosevelt County Courthouse. I somehow was much more aware of those mountains than I was of the man-made structure.

That moment last week just served as a gentle reminder that I need to pay more attention to my surroundings no matter how commonplace. Beauty can be found anywhere you look if you’re ready to look with fresh eyes.

Our plains and deserts have some great beauty from the sunsets to the finest spider web. We often just forget to look closely enough and stay alert to the things that make our environment unique.

We sometimes do the same thing with our friends, family and coworkers. We see them every day and forget the things that make them so special.

Put the raw physical beauty of those individuals aside and focus on their nuances, their uniqueness and even their inner beauty and spirit that so easily stays hidden in the fog.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]