Daily Meditation: Common Everyday Beauty

Daily Meditation: Common Everyday Beauty

We all need help maintaining our personal spiritual practice. We hope that these Daily Meditations, prayers and mindful awareness exercises can be part of bringing spirituality alive in your life.

Today's meditation features a short passage written by naturalist John Muir in honor of Earth Day, which falls on Friday. The passage comes from Muir's 1894 book, The Mountains of California, and it reminds us to take stock of the "common everyday beauty" surrounding us.

Bill Wight via Getty Images

Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common everyday beauty.

-From The Mountains of California by John Muir

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