“The swamp looks beautiful tonight.”
“You can’t use swamp and beautiful in the same sentence.”
“Well, I just did…”
There’s a giant swamp by our house. To be clear, I’m talking about a SWAMP. It’s not a lake or a pond, or any other body of water that might carry a magical connotation. It’s a dirty, muddy, disgusting swamp and if Shrek was real, he would live there. In the summertime, the swamp dries up and morphs into a giant empty field, which is no more magical but slightly more pleasant to stare at on my drive home from work. We were told at one point that houses would be built on the field/swamp, but that was back in 2006 when everyone said it was a GREAT time to buy a home.
Annnnnd I think we all know how that turned out.
But I digress. Back to the swamp. I am a firm believer in the art of finding beauty among the unbeautiful. I believe if you stare at something long enough, and open your eyes to the possibility of beauty existing, you will find it eventually. It’s how we find beauty in the pattern of a broken piece of glass, or in the crisp solace of a dead flower, or in colorful graffiti that litters a once clean surface. Sometimes it takes patience and dedication. Sometimes you have to scrunch your eyes and look at the unbeautiful upside down. And even then, it can often take hours, days, weeks and possibly years to find the beauty you were meant to see all along.
My eyes had been closed to the swamp for a long, long time. Four years to be exact. For four years, I sighed in disgust on a daily basis as I drove past this terribly abandoned lot of land that was nothing short of an eyesore (not to mention a feature devaluing my neighborhood).
To be honest, I hated that swamp.
That is, until one day, when I was driving home from work around 5:45 and happened to catch the swamp in a pure Cinderella moment. As if the nature fairy godmother had given the swamp one night to turn into a princess. The sun was setting, stunning as usual, and the sky was radiating bright shades of pink and orange through the clouds. As I approached the swamp and prepared to turn onto my cross street, my eyes squinted at the sudden influx of color.
The swamp, which usually rippled across the top, was a perfectly smooth reflection instead. As if a giant mirror had been put under the sky, placed there carefully with the sole intention to reflect the beauty above it ten times over. The street lamps, lit high above the water, sparkled in the swamp like tiny fireflies.
It was breathtaking.
The swamp that I had detested for YEARS was so gorgeous I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.
I became so giddy over finally finding beauty in the swamp that I began looking for it every day, almost like a game. Every afternoon, I would race the sunset home, holding my breath for green lights and counting down the minutes until the swamp was in full view. It became one of my favorite moments of each day—taking a quiet minute to find joy in God’s magnificent sunset reflected on top of the swamp.
{ These photos are a poor replication of that Cinderella swamp moment, but will have to suffice. These were taken on 2/12, at 5:45, and are straight off the camera, 100% unedited. }
*joy pledge doily graphics courtesy of Pugly Pixel.
