I left the house this morning in gray light.  In the course of the short drive to Starbucks my attention was attracted to a fragment of fire in my rear view mirror.  The sun.  The star at the center of our solar system is a marker of day and night, and of the seasons, –all consequences of the rotation of our planet on it’s axis and the planet’s journey around the sun.  Space is warped by the mass of sun and earth, such that our planet circles the sun at just the right distance to be hospitable to life, to photo synthesis.  Our planet is always falling into the sun, into life.  Life is an aptitude of sun and earth.

Why beauty?  I am sure there is a multi dimensional answer to the question, that would fill volumes.  I think that beauty has to do with the position of the earth relative to the sun, the earth’s ability to hold it’s atmosphere of oxygen created by plant life, which is essential to the animal life, to say nothing of the co2 which the plants need for the fabrication of plant cell walls, cellulose.  Beauty figures in, perhaps as key, the indispensable dimension.

And there is more than one kind of beauty.  There is visual beauty. There is functional beauty, the design of a bee or a bird that performs flight.  There is audible beauty, in the song of birds.  There is performative beauty in the mating dance of some species.

When all else fails, you can count on beauty.

Every spring I plant zinnias at the end of the garden.  My reasoning is that if the season’s growing conditions are less than optimal for garden vegetables, I can count on the zinnia flowers at the end of the summer to give satisfaction, to produce joy.

They fulfill my expectations, always.

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And a few lines from Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot

I

In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,………