I recently returned from a trip to Venice, Italy, and continue to be filled up with the many images I encountered there.  One of the surprising moments of the trip came when I entered a room in a large palazzo and saw the marble bust of a woman’s head off in a corner.  As I approached, I could feel my mind having difficulty wrapping itself around what I saw.  The woman looked out at the world with a deep serenity.  I could see her eyes, her nose, mouth, ears, braided hair – her cheekbones, chin, and neck.  What boggled my perceptions, though, was that I realized I was seeing all this through a thin veil that covered her face and head.  What took me a long time to be able to register perceptually was that the face and veil were part of one piece of solid marble.  It was, without question, the first time I have ever “seen through marble.”  As I looked at the bust of the woman’s face, I marveled at the creativity it represented, at how the artist had somehow envisioned a woman’s face behind a veil in a solid block of white marble.

Even on the trip home, the vision of this woman’s face and veil stayed with me, and I got to thinking about the beauty we encounter unexpectedly all the time.  For example, we can turn a corner on a street and find ourselves looking at a flowering tree that is particularly abundant or filled with color, or we may enter a room and find ourselves in the presence of a sacred object that moves us deeply.

I’ve visited this subject before, in an earlier experiment, and it comes back to me often.  So much of the time, we find ourselves hearing about, or seeing, bad news – things that are going wrong in our local communities or in the world at large, not to mention all the inevitable ups and downs of everyday living.  Because of the amount of bad news in the world, it’s a particularly important form of nourishment and input when we find ourselves in the presence of unexpected beauty.

For this week’s experiment, I invite you to pay attention to those moments of beauty you might take for granted or overlook in the hustle and bustle of your daily life.  A moment of discovering beauty might be as simple as seeing a butterfly where you didn’t expect to encounter one, or walking along the street and coming upon a pot of colorful flowers that are in full bloom.  Or, you might enter a building and suddenly be surrounded by beautiful music, or see a work of art you didn’t expect to see.  You may look up at the sky and see a cloud formation, a sunrise or sunset that surprises you with its beauty.  There are infinite possibilities to explore.  The point of the experiment is to focus your attention on the beauty in your environment that you either may not have noticed or may have taken for granted.

As with all the experiments, enjoy playing with this one and notice the quality of your internal state of mind and being as you focus on discovering the beauty in your world.