The rain poured down from the heavy sky, soaking our clothes and hair, dripping off our fingertips onto the grass beneath our feet.

We had an umbrella but abandoned it long ago in favor of the wetness which permeated our skin and seemed to cause new life to flourish in our souls as well as in the plants all around us.

To be honest, we looked hysterical: I with my baby strapped to my chest and my girls like three little ducklings tramping behind me. We wandered along our street in search of twigs, acorns, pretty flowers and clovers and a few stones to collect for a fairy garden we were making.

It was Christmas Eve Eve and this was school. Well, this and making a heaping batch of sea salt Nutella fudge for our neighbors.

Inspired to Seek Beauty

I love nature. I always have. Fondly I recall a childhood filled with the marvels of the great outdoors – the great mountains and lakes of Utah – and then on to another lake where I lived, played, and swam until I went to college.

My favorite place on earth is our family cabin in the woods of Cashiers, North Carolina, where as a child I created homes for salamanders, snakes, and lizards and named streams and waterfalls.

But the inspiration to trek out into heavy rain with my four children that day came from C.S. Lewis. The last few years I have taken a headlong plunge into his works and still haven’t come out. I’m in “literary love” with this man’s writings and can’t seem to get enough of them.

So when my pastor encouraged us to read Lewis’s “Surprised By Joy,” I eagerly accepted the challenge. One of the first lovely discoveries I made from its contents was a story of Lewis’s first encounter with beauty as a child. It came in the form of his brother’s toy garden:

“Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew…It made me aware of nature – not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant. I do not think the impression was very important at the moment, but it soon because important in memory. As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.”

In Pursuit of Beauty

Beauty – real beauty, is all around us if our eyes are open to see it.

The older I get the more certain I am that beauty is often not found where the world says that it is.

It is not on the glossy pages of magazines filled with photoshopped models.

It is not in crowded stores with racks of designer clothing.

It is not in picture perfect houses, sparkling clean and flawlessly designed.

I see beauty in the wrinkles of my Grandmother’s 95 year old hands, rough with age and life and stories of generations past.

I see beauty in a simple clover covered with dew sticking through the pavement on my driveway, happily reminding me that life always finds a way through.

I see beauty in my messy kitchen and toy-covered floor, because life happens here and people are enjoying it.

This year, I am inspired to seek and be surprised by beauty all around me…to appreciate the lack of ostentatiousness in a simple daisy and the non-dramatic cover of an old but classic book which stimulates the imagination.

Where do you find beauty? Where do you seek it? Perhaps it can be found in humble people and quiet places – or simply where and when we least expect to find it.

But when we have caught a glimpse of genuine beauty we will know it – for it will be, as Lewis said, a foretaste of Paradise itself and whet in us a thirst and hunger to know the author of such beauty – God Almighty- the Beautiful One.