#5: A Bittersweet Beauty

A journal entry written in 2023, after a moment of significance in the Smoky Mountains: 

“I am tragically in love with beauty. I am miserably wooed by the sublime. And I desperately hope I am not alone in this entrapment.

It’s a cumbersome thing to carry; these encounters with magnificence. I often find myself uncertain of how to behave. Should I spend a length of time gazing at it, though it makes me feel small and bittersweet? Should I avert my eyes and preserve my good mood, though I’d have to tamper down a call from somewhere beyond?

This beauty that’s transfixed me is no ordinary thing, despite the frequency with which it appears. It’s more than a pleasantly designed dress or a properly done painting. Such things are nice to look at, but they do not stir the soul in the way it demands to be provoked. Rather, I find myself allured by the shadow of the Divine. It is enticing the way mountains melt into the horizon. It is maddening the way clouds are stretched above, appearing so brilliant to the touch yet forever out of reach. I think my being knows it was designed to dance among them. 

Birds move about with such freedom, deer are so content in the woodland homes. Creation is a puzzling entity and offers a contradiction to those who are in tune with it. 

On one hand, it is a comfort to faintly hear the echos of Paradise. On the other, it brings about a reaction that’s hard to reconcile, for it riles up in me frustration and longing and discontentment. My spirit knows that these glimpses of glory are not the full picture. And like a child, I am impatient in waiting for the entirety of the good thing. I want my dessert before dinner, my presents before Christmas. 

I know what awaits and am therefore painfully aware of how unsatisfying this world is. It produces this troublesome relationship with beauty.

Perhaps it is the purpose, to lift my eyes from the ground before me and force me to look into the beyond. If everything were dull, I’d have no substantial way to ideate a better version of reality. I’d be limited by the small amount of dopamine a good moment could produce. I’d have no sense for redemption, because I could reason that what’s before me is good enough.

But it is woefully not.

The sound of the ocean waves are like a small bite of a delectable meal. I know I need more. When I’m immersed in a pine forest, I am inexplicably pulled towards somewhere else, somewhere my soul is convinced it’d be satisfied. I think this is the summation of a faith-filled life.

By faith, we seek to get a more accurate view of what was and what is to come. And by faith, we strive to live well in the what is. This is no small task. We’re stuck in an odd limbo, with an inkling of how things were meant to be and an intimacy with how wrongly they’ve turned out.

What tragic souls we are, feeling the fullest expression of homesickness, yet completely incapable to satiate it.

The question remains, though. How do I go about this life as a longing soul anchored by flesh and gravity?

To the best of my thinking, the answer lies in the following process: Allow yourself to gaze upon beauty, with the expectance of it producing wonder and sadness. The first is a reaction that is to be enjoyed, and the second is an emotion we should allow ourselves time to sit with. This results in a better grasp of the terrible ways what was has crumbled into what is.

And then let hope be stirred up as you anticipate all that is to come.

Letting that longing resonate within you grows the attribute of patience. And if you wish to walk well during the what is, then hope and patience are the two most desirable tools to wield. And then fear not, weary soul, for the good thing is not far off.”

The best is yet to come.

Madison Marlyn
8.15.2025