I'm fortunate to live in a place where I'm surrounded by great natural beauty. I am guilty of gloating just a little at times when I observe that "...for most people, Alaska is a once- or twice-in-a-lifetime vacation. We live here." We wake up every morning to the seasons of our rural Susitna Valley home, surrounded by trees and wildlife. It's a beautiful setting; our black spruce and white birch, the birds, the animal visitors from moose right down to the little weasel that lives under our lilac bush. (He even has a name - Herman the Ermine.)
But then, I grew up in a setting in Allamakee County, Iowa, where I also woke every morning to hardwood timber, a sparkling clear trout stream steps from the front door, and birds and animals all about. Plenty of other folks like in similar surroundings; they are all over the country in great variety, from Florida to Alaska, from Minnesota to Texas.
Beauty is important. An appreciation of beauty is a large part of what makes us human, what makes us civilized. And it's all around us.
I am also fortunate that in my life, I've had the opportunity to travel a lot and I've seen lots of beautiful places, like the mountains and fields of Japan, the Black Forest in Germany, the Laurentides of Quebec, the Hill Country of Texas, and many more such places. I was also fortunate to not only have parents who possessed and instilled in me a deep appreciation of natural beauty but also a father who was adept at capturing that beauty on canvas; Dad was a Midwestern artist of some renown who, from 1968 until the mid-'80s, had his own space in the Iowa state capitol where one of his paintings always hung.
While I tend to appreciate and seek out natural beauty, beauty comes in many forms. You can find it in architecture, be it a medieval cathedral or a Japanese shrine. You can find it in art, ranging from Normal Rockwell to Michaelangelo. You might find it in a compelling piece of literature, a well-performed stage play, or a great piece of cinema. It's not the where that matters so much as the why.
Why seek out beauty?
Beauty can also distract us from our worries, which may be why some of the humorless, peripatetic doom-criers and grievance-mongers among us deride art and beauty and even seek to destroy it. These people are not to be trusted. They are literally trying to tear down much of what makes us civilized folk.
See Related: Why Does the Radical Left Hate Beauty?
Beauty Trends Change, but Ugly Will Never Be Beauty
What's more, while the appreciation of beauty is a big part of what makes us civilized people, the production of beauty is one of the hallmarks of civilized people. From my Dad's paintings to the Sistine Chapel, one of the primary features of civilized people is the willful, deliberate, thoughtful production of beauty, from sculpture to performance to landscaping.
Beauty is where you find it, and it's highly subjective. I can only speak for myself in these matters, but I can say that, aside from the natural beauty around us, I see beauty in my wife's smile, in our daughters and grandchildren, and in the memories of family members no longer with us. I suspect most people from stable, traditional backgrounds can say much the same thing.
We live in interesting times, as in the "ancient Chinese curse" sense. As the self-appointed stormy petrel of RedState, I'm as aware as anyone of the perilous era we live in. But beauty is one of the things that bring us meaning and can, at least, take our minds off our worries for a while. Look for it and appreciate it, be it in a museum, a gallery, on a computer screen, in the smile on the face of a child, or just outside your back door. It's worth the effort.
