I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk between me and the crying of the frogs?
Lately, I've been taking more notice of the world around me. Maybe it's just that it's spring, but I don't know when I've ever experienced anything so painfully beautiful.
There is nothing in the world so purple as the periwinkles nestled against their dark leaves, or the lilac in full, memorial bloom. I have smelled their heady scent, and I know that no perfume ever will do for me unless it is the smell of the lilac caught in my hair. I have seen purple flowers twining over a mailbox, so very very purple against green and white, and realized that no painting, no picture, nothing but the eyes themselves could ever trap that moment with the same vivid colors.
I walk up the hill from the bus, and I have to stop dead when I see the wood and the yard. The forsythia glowed yellow like a thousand miniature suns, and the spring beauties carpeted the ground with purest, fragile whiteness. Is there anything so blue as the little flowers that bloom beneath the maple tree? There are only the bluebells to hold that much color. Irises stand like purple and pink soldiers, phlox like blue-grey ghosts. And all around, an infinity of green.
I have seen an azalea bush red with bloom, as though it bore a crop of human hearts. I have seen dark, dark red flowers that pierced me to the heart with the beauty of them. The leaves of the maple are the deepest of reds with only a hint of purple. Flowers gleam like their tips are on fire. I have seen flowers in bloom that teach me again the meaning of the word 'magenta'.
Even the green is a blessing, a fatal beauty. There are so many shades, from the near-black to the fragile and nearly yellow. Trees mingle their leaves in a collage of verdant magnificence, and outside the wood the fields are pure, perfect green with new growth. I walk down a path or a road, and the trees are a perfect arch of deep green above me, light and shadow mingling.
No one can claim to know color who has not seen the springtime of the world.
To call these colors emerald, ruby, sapphire, is to devalue them, for no gemstone that ever was or ever will be glowed like this, like a living thing. As a statue of a woman does not and never will have the feel of a woman, so these stones are not and cannot hope to be the same overpowering ecstasy of color that spring brings to the woods.
I saw a rainbow on Monday evening, a pure single bow that reached from horizon to horizon. It was so clear, I could count the colors in its arch. Against the blue and grey of sky and floating clouds, it was a perfect thing. It is for this that the word "awesome" was invented, for watching it I felt I understood the feelings of Noah, as he came forth from his ark and saw the rainbow of his God.
This world could destroy me, and I would not care. It is the price I expect to pay for seeing these things that are so much more real than anything else in a thousand worlds. But it has not destroyed me yet, and I wonder why.
And I think to myself, What have I done to deserve a world so marvelous as this?