Pockets

We are gearing up to backpack the Chilkoot Trail as a family this summer. That means the Easter Bunny brought new hiking boots and dehydrated meals for the kids. Who needs chocolate eggs when you have Leonardo da Fettuccine? You think that's bad? The British folks we met last time on the trail had dehydrated "spotted dick". The things you can dehydrate! We're taste testing to see what is worthy of the trip. 

But in the process of shopping, I bought myself a fabulous new quick-dry shirt. This is huge. I rarely buy clothes for myself. I would still be wearing 20 year old sweaters if my mom didn't buy me new clothes. Regardless, I still wear 20 year old sweaters.

Hannah made me take a few things
out of my pockets. I go overboard
sometimes.

So I have this cute, sporty shirt with pockets in the boobs. Seriously. I love pockets, but I can't figure out why someone would strategically place them there. I wore my new shirt on a lovely hike today and spent almost the whole time thinking about what I would put in these pockets. 

They seem completely pointless, except when I try to put my keys in the pocket and then they are pointy in all the wrong places. 

I crack myself up.

I feel strangely irritated to have these useless pockets. But then as I wasted several hours wandering the woods, I started to think most of what is precious in life is pointless. 

I was thinking especially of beauty. 

In my mind there is a difference between pretty and beauty. Pretty feels like a tool you use to seduce or manipulate someone. I'm not only thinking of people, but it seems like lots of movies and even worship styles come off as pretty. 

They feel dolled up not only to entertain, but to leave you with a certain way of thinking or feeling when you are done. I walk away with the sense there was a hidden agenda rather than entering the mystery of a story. Being pretty is a useful tool to get you something.

Beauty is an end in itself and useless. 

If it has a specific agenda or desired outcome, then it is an act of propaganda not beauty.

Webster defines beauty as a "combination of qualities that please the senses." 

I think beauty is kind of like how we talk about "God sightings" in our house. They are moments that take your breath away. They pull you into a reality bigger than yourself, and you get a glimpse of the eternal as you step outside of time and space.

My tea bag tag said something like "life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but the moments that take our breath away." Kind of cheesy and kind of true.

We often know beauty only when we bump into it and are left breathless. 

Beauty is a vulnerable offering without strings, but it does demand a sensitive openness to the world. It takes being present with your senses open to what is going on around you.

Sometimes I feel like we are surrounded by so many pretty things that it's hard to see beauty anymore. We have so many pretty things pulling us one way or another, it's hard to be patient and open to those useless offerings of beauty. Those moments that do nothing other than pull us out of ourselves to experience the world and ourselves from a different place. 

My shirt does not do that. It's just weird, but it does wick my sweat and that is good for something.