Transient Beauty.

Transient. Trans is from the Latin word for across. Beauty. Well who knows what that is? We all think we know. That’s probably true for most of us. I do but only sometimes. Beauty is sort of a ghost, a ghost that embodies whatever we choose for it to define. That’s beauty. In society beauty is lust and beauty is art and beauty is what we are taught to behold. In reality, however, beauty is none of these things.

Beauty is undefinable. Not because it has no definition or purpose. No it’s undefinable because it’s grace and the veil of beauty is so thin it’s nearly transparent. It’s changing and it’s surprising and it comes and goes as it pleases. Beauty doesn’t make appointments and it doesn’t come by request. Beauty is wild and does as it wishes. It likes to sneak up on you and it likes to gradual appear.

Beauty is a muse and it changes form with its will. Unlike the beauties in our magazines, the beauties in our paintings, and the beauties in our stories, beauty cannot be captured. Instead, it leaves us like children on a moonlight hill trying to catch lightning bugs in a jar with no lid. Sometimes it comes but how long it stays or how we capture it is up to the beauty.

It’s of a free, unpolluted, intangible, and transient nature and while we can describe it and see it and remember it, we can grasp it no more easily than if we were to reach up and try to seize a cloud.