On a windy cold morning as I returned from the bakery, ready for a day of creative industry, I spied a fascinating composition of shapes that was once a a single leaf, attached to the twisted rope of its stem. And then further down the road lay a delicate piece of skeletal lace.
Refuse, lying spent in the gutter, strewn desolately across the footpath. But the aesthetic spirits of these fragile leaves had not departed and they spoke to me. It compelled me to honour them as objets d'art in a mobile. And the exquisite vulnerability of their form told proverbs about how to see.
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Contemplate beauty in all people and you will see their inherent value.
Listen carefully; beauty whispers from desolation.
Function can be reinvented; there is no uselessness.
Value and respect the resources you expend.
Resist the tyranny of desiring what is new.
Reaching for the shiny and refined does not stretch one’s imaginative muscle.
All beauty enriches; finding it in unlikely places grows contentment.
When you next step out into a bleak wintery day consider the beauty of the leaves underfoot and the wisdom they impart. Winter affords us this luxury.
