“Beauty—the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.” –Leon Battista Alberti
“I’m tired of this nonsense abut beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?” –Jean Kerr
“There’s beauty all around our paths, if but our watchful eyes
Can trace it ‘midst familiar things…” –Felicia Hemans
“What is really beautiful needs no adorning.” –Sataka
“It is only through the morning gate of the beautiful that you can penetrate into the realm of knowledge. That which we here see as beauty we shall one day know as truth.”
–Friedrich Schiller
“Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself, and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it.” –Marcus Aurelius
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
For an animal like us there can be beauty in many things. Something we hear—an aria, a Sage Thrasher’s long song, some long-favored melody, the voice of your child or your cat. Maybe even a scent from a flower or a glass container holding some magic elixir. But most often it is something we see.
One stormy, cloudy, windy day with mutable weather, a day that brought sunshine, rain, hail, lack of constancy, that day brought amazing beauty. A cloud gape let through early afternoon sunlight, brightness that inflamed the silvery leaves of a distant Russian olive thicket. Normally this invasive tree is small, squat, easily ignored. This time a small thicket erupted with an intensely pale golden glow. Then clouds suddenly moved to close the gap that had allowed the light and soon: ordinary olives once again. 
BEAUTY COMES IN MANY SIZES
This male Mountain Bluebird was on Steens, about 6000 feet elevation.
Male Horned Lark at Chickahominy on his particular sagebrush. The Franklin’s Gull was at The Narrows. The Bobolink was just east of Diamond Elementary School. Male Bullock’s Oriole near his nest in Russian olives just north of the Field Station office building…right over a comfy bench. The pronghorn along Hwy 205 north of The Narrows–only seen there once. There was a brief glimpse of young hidden in the tall grass. The view of the bluffs under storm clouds is across Benson Pond.
Towheeblog 
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