Seeing beauty

The theme for this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge is magic.

That’s a really cool subject, and as soon as I read it, I knew I wanted to post something, so I let the concept start rolling around my brain, picking up lint and potato chip crumbs (need to vacuum in there) while trying to crystallize what it is that I find magical.

A poem kept coming to mind.  I read it ages ago in high school, but it stuck with me, I think, because of the flat-out gorgeous, visceral imagery and the message –  of what beauty lies in the incredible uniqueness we see in the world all around us: light, dark, bright, shadowed, striped, swirled, one of a kind:

Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; a-dazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins

My theme for this month’s Nano Poblano challenge is Motion.