I have never been beautiful enough to don and maintain the implications of the American Indian (Hopi? Navajo?) observation that "all around me is beauty." The fact that I cannot escape does not change anything.
But for all that, I have made contact with drips and drops of the inescapable. About like anyone else, I suspect -- moments so clear and clean and unencumbered that beauty -- for lack of another word -- takes on an imperative to seek and find and capture or recapture.
I have never been beautiful enough. Which is not to say I have not petitioned and pleaded ... and yet simultaneously feared: If things were profoundly OK and, more, beautiful, well ... there is a death of sorts in there somewhere and death makes me squeamish, even as it beguiles.
A slight smile, a violin note, a handshake, a painting hanging in no particular grandeur, a dog's tongue against the cheek, a farewell wave ... beautiful in the moment yet unable to make it linger and last. I have never been beautiful enough to be beautiful.
I guess what put me in mind of all this was a song that arose out of the Internet screen:
A petition. Perhaps not your petition or mine, but a petition nonetheless.
I had a moment or two when the world was perfect. Perfection's got nothing to hang on to though. But Dobie Gray, yeah.
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