Beauty is all about us, but how many are blind to it!
People take little pleasure
in the natural and quiet
and simple things of life.
~ Pablo Casals
IT WAS a tackle in a hectic game of rugby, and the two 13-year-olds ended up face down in the sea of mud – mud resulting from months of scrums, rucks and mauls across a once-grassy pitch.
I was the one tackling and it wasn’t a particularly brilliant tackle. But, as we sucked ourselves out of the mud, wiping it from eyes, nose and mouth, I suddenly noticed how the low winter sun had turned the mud silver. Silver. The whole boot-rutted expanse of mud gleamed and it was like hammered metal. It was quite astonishingly beautiful.
However I didn’t realise this was beauty. I just liked what I saw. And at a rugby school in those days beauty did not come up for mention (except in regard to girls, and we never saw any of those, since this was an all-male boarding school). Besides, had I recognised it as beauty, I’d have kept my mouth shut.
Four years later, in my final spring term at Clongowes, we were on a route march with the FCA — the school’s unit of the Local Defense Force — and, as we tramped along a forest track, the command was given to halt. At ease. Stand easy. Down went the rifles and we stretched and breathed the forest air.
I happened to look up at the canopy of beech leaves overhead, and I saw something I had never noticed before. The sunlight wasn’t bouncing off the leaves, but filtering through them, so that each leaf lit up and glowed like a tiny green flame. It was as if the whole nave of trees where we stood was roofed with shimmering green fire. I have never forgotten the moment. This time I knew I was encountering beauty, and recognising it for the first time in my life.
I have seen that green fire many times since.
Fast forward to recent times, when I was at a writer’s retreat in Devon. For some reason I don’t remember, our lecturer took us down to the banks of a river that ran through a grove of trees, fresh in their green of spring. I looked up and once again saw the shimmering leaves, translucent in the sunlight. [994]
‘Isn’t amazing how those leaves glow, just like tiny flames?’ I remarked to a young woman beside me.
She looked up and her eyes widened. ‘Omigod, would you look!’ She just gazed open-mouthed. Then she turned to me. ‘You know something,’ she said, ‘I’ve never noticed that before.’]
‘You will again,’ I said. ‘From now on you’ll never not notice it.’ <>