Beauty and love are all around us if our eyes and hearts are open to them

By David McElroy · November 5, 2011

It’s easy for me to get depressed about the state of things in this fallen world. Everywhere I look, there’s ugliness, ignorance and hatred. Those things are very real. But if all we see is the squalor in the world, we’re missing the love and beauty that were put all around us to experience. They’re very real, too.

I’ve seen evidence of the very bad and the very good this week, and I’m constantly trying to reconcile the two. It seems that the more you feel one of the extremes, the more you’re capable of experiencing the other extreme.

From talking to others, I suspect that I experience both extremes more strongly than most. The things that hurt me don’t just disappoint. They wound something really deeply, even if it’s something that wouldn’t affect others. I’ve never liked that about myself, but I suspect that if I didn’t feel so deeply about the hurtful things, I wouldn’t feel the beautiful things so strongly.

I started thinking about this Friday night as I drove west on I-20 in Birmingham just barely after sunset. I came over the top of a hill and suddenly had a vast open space ahead of me with hills in the distance. The fading sunset was a pinkish orange hanging just above the black of the hill contours.

It was breathtaking to me. It wasn’t just beautiful. It was something that touched me emotionally. For that moment, all the ugliness of the world was gone. All the problems of daily life were gone. I felt content, at peace and as though I was experiencing something God put in front of me — just for me.

When I feel the other side — the negative side — of this emotional experience, it’s easy to stay there. I’ve been guilty of seeing the negative, getting scared and then not pulling myself out. I’ve lost some things that mattered to me as a result, simply because I experienced the negative side of something too long and couldn’t balance it with the positive that was just as real.

Most normal people’s emotions seem to have a narrower range than mine do. Their highs aren’t nearly as high and their lows aren’t nearly as low. Because of that, it seems as though many people (maybe even most) are oblivious to many things that seem obvious to me. I have no idea why. I just know that I can’t not feel — and I know the feelings aren’t always easy to control.

Honestly, though, I don’t want to change what I feel, because the feelings are who I am. If you took away the intensity of my feelings — of what I experience and what I feel in others — I would be left with a steady but boring and unlivable life. It would be like getting an emotional lobotomy or becoming autistic. I couldn’t understand people. I couldn’t feel life.

All of this brings me to a topic that I find myself constantly revisiting, even though it’s not even close to the political, economic and social ground we normally cover here. The question is where art comes from.

I constantly find myself seeing beautiful things and taking pictures of them, yet having the people with me not even notice the thing that has caught my attention until after I show them. I constantly end up with photos that are lovely, but which are just dim shadows of the beauty I see with my eyes. Yet until I point to it, many people don’t notice. Why?

I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s because I’m an extremist with my emotions. I suspect it’s because I feel something in a sunset or a tree or a cat or even a woman’s face that most normal people don’t feel. And this explains why I’m always so embarrassed when people praise photos I’ve taken. I feel like a fraud, because I know that I didn’t create anything. I simply saw what was already there and pointed the camera and framed the shot in the best way I could. In anything beautiful that I might create — and maybe that anyone creates — I’m not sure that we create beauty. I suspect that we simply notice it — whether with our eyes or with the mind’s eye — and find some artistic medium in which to record it.

There’s always going to be ugliness and hatred around us. We live in a fallen world where those things are rampant. But we don’t have to be discouraged and afraid that the ugliness is what the world is really about. As long as we learn to balance the good and the bad — and as long as we can remain in control of the intensity that threatens to overwhelm some of us — we can focus on good things.

We can choose to see the beauty and feel the love that’s all around us — if our brains and hearts are open to feeling what’s really there.

Note: The pictures with this article are random examples of beauty that I see around me. The top photo is a gorgeous sky that appeared outside of a fast food restaurant where I was eating a few months ago. The leaves are from a tree on my street last week. The picture of the large tree at sunset was taken a few blocks from my house last year. The sunset below was over part of downtown Birmingham last year. All four were taken with my iPhone.

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Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

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