Simple Beauty

We stopped at the craft store today to pick up some more wick for candle dipping and to look at pink fabrics for a baby quilt. The fabrics were a delight for the eye. So many colors, so many combinations, so many textures. Almost more than my mind could soak in. Same with the yarns. Rows upon rows of color, demanding to be touched, felt, taken in by more than just vision. Some seemed as though they should smell like a baby or cotton candy.
Along other isles, fake flowers, real looking many with fake drops of dew on them. Walking down each row of the store gave me insight into how the attraction of so many items gets us into trouble. Buying more than we need. Our senses overloaded and filled with the desire to own, to bring home, to have this store ever present. Feeling as if we cannot live without this or that new thing. I bought what I needed and a couple things that had nothing to do with need, but only want. A baby is coming so want plays a bigger role in my life right now. Creating a beautiful environment for her seems important, necessary to me. But what I want for her to learn in life is to look deeper than man made things, so I need to watch myself, make certain this grandmother teaches what I believe in most deeply.
To balance what is of the earth and what is not.
Walking through the door to our home, I was greeted with the light scent of incense, burned this morning early while I sat and contemplated life, and also the air had a chill, a reminder that I lit no fire this morning in my rush to get where I needed to be in time. There was also the smell of health food, it is distinct. Herb like, but more. If you know it, you recognize it quickly. Brewers yeast, nuts, dried fruit, herbs, Braggs amino acids, and grains That sort of thing. It seems you can always tell upon entering the house of a health food nut, the house smells different, as different as say a Whole Foods market from a regular food store.
But what really struck me as I came into the house, was a pile of old threads, casually tossed on a piece of hand-woven fabric, catching the late morning sun. My old glasses that I love to wear, they make me feel connected to a time past, these glasses lay right on that same cloth. So simple and so NOT flashy like the things in the store I had just come from. The sight of them made me sigh that sort of sigh that comes from a feeling of, "yes, this is right, this is simple beauty". In a world filled with flashing pictures before our eyes on a television screen, to glossy magazines showing us all what we DON'T have yet, and store shelves calling to us, begging us to over spend, over buy, such a simple thing as old thread on a rough piece of cloth refreshes the soul. We are much like people that eat too much salt on their food and can't taste the subtle flavors anymore. We see so much flash, we miss the simple beauty in a leaf, a bird, a cloud, the sunrise, the wind in our hair, the pattern on a puddle frozen into ice.
Time now to slow down, take time away from stores, movies, television, magazines and just look around us at the simple things.