Everything is beautiful, in its own way ….

I have a love-hate relationship with Plato.

William Blake in his Auguries of Innocence perhaps picks up the theme best:

“To see a world in a grain of sand,


And a heaven in a wild flower,


Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,


And eternity in an hour”.

The great Buddhist/Christian Thich Nhat Han says something similar:

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”

Or perhaps the Paul the Apostle:

"In god we live and move and have our being."

Back to Plato, from whom I take it that if we look deeply enough into the most "common" of things we penetrate the barrier between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds. We see the beauty that is within us is also within that which we gaze upon.

Idealism or realism?