tiny beauty

I like these words I read in a devotional by Brennan Manning:

"We first experience beauty usually in the things that surround us. Sometimes in sensible things, other times in the transparency of a look or a glance that reveals a soul full of light. Whenever we encounter the beautiful, our hearts awaken, stir, quicken, thrill, because there is an extraordinary, magic power in the least thing: a tiny plant burgeoning in spring, a shade of the sky at a given moment of the day, a calm, cold night brilliant with starshine--all things that ravish the heart. They’re a small taste of Paradise Lost on an earth where so many things are torn and tearing. They are little oases in the vast wasteland of the world."
(Is. 40:26 ref.)

It's the sum total of all the little things that color the lenses of how we see life.