Finding the Beauty in Everything

 By Kristy Belaney

  Yesterday I took a route home I don’t normally take. As I was rounding the corner of a particularly overgrown weedy area, something caught my attention. It was a giant patch of blooming Asclepias syriaca, swarming with bumblebees, moths and other pollinators working away, unknowingly doing their good deeds.

   I paused, took a moment to gather it all in and smiled. I have lived at this address for nearly ten years and never noticed this simple but beautiful gift just two hundred feet from my front door. Maybe if I had seen them before, I would have thought the flowers were cute or enjoyed the pleasant smell they gave off as I walked by. But that is probably where the admiring would have ended. By the time I got home I would have forgotten all about the not so particularly memorable flower. And what a shame that would have been.

 

 “ I was guilty of not appreciating the little things. ” 

 

Kristy Belaney

Bumblebee on Asclepias syriaca

   You see up until recently I was guilty of not appreciating the little things. I thought I loved nature but in reality I was only giving credit to certain pieces of it. It was easy to see the beauty in the way sunlight reflects like diamonds off the ripples of a stream. I could always find it in the colorful blanketed landscape of a field of wildflowers. But the beauty of nature can be found in so much more than what meets the eye. Scratch the surface and you will see that there are hidden gems throughout, although less glamorous, but equally beautiful in their own way.

 “If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.” 

 

Vincent van Gogh  

  What began the start of my new outlook was a quote I came upon by Vincent van Gogh. It read, “If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.” I really thought about those words and it hit me that I was guilty of only seeing the beauty in the most obvious.

  That quote became so meaningful to me that I vowed to always scratch the surface. It took patience and an open mind but now I can see that sometimes what is not conventionally pleasing to the eye is filled with importance. Sometimes it is the smallest thing that deserves the attention and not the grandest. In a sense, you can’t have one thing without the other. Essentially everything from earthworms to mankind each make up a strand in the larger web of life. Whatever we do to that web we do to ourselves in the end. And that is why it is so important to love everything about nature, even the parts of it you might not understand.

Alianthus Webworm Moth

  Now, when I see that field of wildflowers I look past the vibrant colors and find the splendor in all the beneficial insects doing their part to make that flower a reality for me to enjoy. When I do volunteer stream monitoring for the Ohio Division of Watercraft, I still love the sight of the sunlight dancing on the waters surface but now I also see the beauty in the riffle beetles, water pennies, mayfly nymphs and other organisms collected and recorded that day. I can appreciate their role in keeping the river a healthy environment for fish and other wildlife to thrive in.

  Yesterday instead of just walking by that patch of milkweed, I admired it for the critical role it plays in the monarch butterfly life cycle. I counted the types of bumblebees visiting the flowers and searched for eggs and caterpillars. Before it would have been an afterthought but now it had made my entire day.

  Nature has changed what I find is beautiful. There is something to be gained from looking past the obvious. I hope whoever owns that land never clears the milkweed plants growing there. I hope they truly love nature too, just like me.

Kristy