Beauty Only Comes by Grace

Grace in the Hallway: Where Beauty Hangs and Echoes Whisper Back

I once heard that beauty only comes by grace.

So it came to be that I stood with my sister, in the presence of grace — in the form of beauty, in the form of art, in the form of paintings that hung in long hallways that echoed as we spoke.

They were marine paintings, seascapes of vast churning waves and lemon surf.

A question came unexpectedly to mind. I put it to my sister.

“What would you give to do this, to paint like this, to be a great painter?” I asked her.

She answered me with only silence. And one way we come to know ourselves—and reveal ourselves to others—is through the things we do not say, the questions we do answer.

Since that day in the gallery, the patterns of my life have risen and fallen like the waves in the paintings, and have mingled with the patterns of other lives—also rising and falling.

A wave is a pattern and so with mine there has been a sudden lurching forward, a hard drop, and a spinning turn to the left.

I know now that when I asked my sister that question all those years ago, I was not really asking her at all.

I was asking myself.

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