Beauty Transforms

Beauty continues...

The question on my heart today is how does beauty change us, transform us?

And once again this seems to me a parallel if not equivalent question regarding God, the Divine, that which is Holy. The Swan and Grace change us.

Mary Oliver provides so many beautiful observations of beauty, as though the beauty we see becomes the beauty we do, or write, or play, or represent. 

Today The Swan assists me in leaning into a mystery which is all around us to be noticed and received.

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?

Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –

An armful of white blossoms,

A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned

into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,

Biting the air with its black beak?

Did you hear it, fluting and whistling

A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall

Knifing down the black ledges?

And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –

A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet

Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?

– Mary Oliver 

P.S. I am particularly intrigued by the capital ‘S’ in Streaming...