A celebration of beauty

At last count, there were 4,278 photographs crowding the memory of my laptop, and at least a thousand of them came through the camera lenses of my son Paul. One word embraces them all: Beautiful!

Paul has traveled the world as a photojournalist, and without effort turned his work into heart-transforming joy.  Beauty comes with every click of his many cameras despite the unease and insecurity felt in the everyday life of many of his subjects.

Paul has caught a full moon spilling silver across the Indian Ocean beaches of KwaZulu-Natal; a restless Pacific tossing rainbows under the piers of Santa Monica Bay; the gleam on the hoods of more than 200 cars collected in the garages of former TV host Jay Leno; and the sunless shine across immeasurable stretches of ice north of the Arctic Circle (shot from a Smart car for the Sun newspaper in London).

      My masthead this month—the light golden touch of fall on the Colorado River, near the village of Dotsero—is yet another example of Paul’s delight in the beauty of much of the world around us.
  Beauty, of course, is subjective, and is expressed inwardly and outwardly. It flows freely through every collection of adages and literary quotations you’ve ever seen, and the Bible contributes its share of insights and inspiration.

For example: “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment … Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight” (1 Peter: 3,4, NIV).

Or, in a sightly different context: “The right word spoken at the right time is as beautiful as gold apples in a silver bowl” (Proverbs 25:11, New Century Version).

And that profoundly insightful Bible scholar Mary Baker Eddy, relating beauty to the flawless creation of God as Mind, and to the “unchanging calm and glorious freedom of spiritual harmony,” wrote: “Beauty is a thing of life, which dwells forever in the eternal Mind and reflects the charms of His goodness in expression, form, outline, and color” (Science and Health, pp. 247, 248).

         But the last word should come  from my photographer himself: “Photography is like meditation for me. When I pick up my cameras, I tend to shut everything else out and focus purely on capturing what we  can so easily miss. In this fast-paced world we live in, it’s easy to forget to stop and take in the beauty that surrounds us.”

More images at: www.paulshippey.com