It is 2012...
..."and beauty calls but few can see
Creation's glorious majesty."
- from The Great Legacy. 

   Heed not the noisy hucksters of our day whose loud persuasions seek to convince you that you will find beauty in a bottle, or in their fabricated, false tinsel dreams. Look rather to nature for therein one finds a true beauty, wild and sweet, that bears many gifts now forgotten by the many, but still a benevolent and stabilizing companion to the few.

    Everybody needs beauty: places to play in and places to pray in where nature gives strength to body and soul.   -         John Muir.

   Go forth then, with open mind and find thyself a tranquil and beautiful place where body and soul can fall back into the gentle embrace of the wonder and beauty of the Great Gift that is our natural world.  Be comforted to know that one can find this sweet embrace anywhere from the sweeping expanse of the great outdoors to the depths of an unfolding flower; in the life giving glory of the rising sun, or in the mystical sweep of stars in the night sky.  

   Hear ye now one of nature's secrets, that being that for those who but sit quietly and wait, there is oft visited upon them a miraculous and mystical moment that defies all description: for those of clear and open mind  shall find themselves suddenly wrapped in a mantle of sweet and peaceful stillness, of deep intuitive awakening during which they feel comfortably embraced by  the gentle spirit of all that is: by the universal energy of the Great Oneness of All Things. 

   Then does one behold truth in every direction. Then does one not only become aware of love, one becomes love, embracing all that is, was or ever will be. 

   This radiant and captivating moment might last for but a few moments but it is indelible, and one carries it for the rest of one’s life, awakened and warmed by its memorable light.

   Thus and only thus, on our earth, as many revisit, or discover anew the beauty that surrounds them, can we begin to awaken and to see with clarity the collective hallucination, the delusion in which we now are living.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." ~ Albert Einstein

”Beauty will save the world,” said Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Thus and only thus in awakening to and revering the beauty around us will we begin to trace the path to a better world...for ourselves and for generations to come.

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world...we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other."
                               - Joanna Macy, American scholar and author

   The Buddha pointed the way twenty-five hundred years ago when he said, "Love is beauty and beauty is truth, and that is why in the beauty of a flower we can see the truth of the universe.

In nature is the salvation of the world. 
           - Henry David Thoreau

Rapid advancement of technology and modern living conditions have set us apart from this intimate connection to the natural beauty we used to see around us, and we have grown to see ourselves as quite apart from it, independent of it, and worst, perhaps, in control of it: for material things and shelter and sustenance wrap us in a false sense of invulnerability and abundance, enclosing us in a cocoon of modern convenience...and delusion.  Thus can we easily turn our minds to other things. Such a detachment works for a while, but…the god of materialism who provides such things, to whom we now bow in large numbers, has proven a greedy master…

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So how do we regain that connection to the beauty that surrounds us?

There is good reason to say this.