Unexpected Beauty

There is beauty everywhere, if we only take a moment to look. If we only open our eyes, our hearts to the unexpected.

I love nature, the woods, the wild, lonely places. But I also love my city, and many of the others that W has introduced me to in the past few years.

This Saturday, on one of our weekend wanderings, we turned down an empty street between some abandoned buildings by the Mississippi River.

This is one side of a building we saw:

I think a lot of people would find nothing beautiful in this building, would think of it as an eyesore, but even if I had never seen the other side of it, I would have still found something…compelling in it.

W loves these old abandoned places because they are reminders of a bygone time, and of a prosperous, industrialized city, one that he would have loved to have inhabited. I love it because of its starkness, its loneliness, out here on the edge of the city, on the banks of a river that has also seen more prosperous times.

There is beauty everywhere, if you only take the time to look…

I don’t know if this image is part of the larger project, called “Migrate, the Cotton Belt Mural Project” or if that was just someone wanting to add their own artistic commentary to it, but either way I was moved by their desire to create something beautiful here, where few people go.

And as for the mural itself, which is intended to be an artistic “welcome sign” for those crossing the new Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge into St. Louis, I was awed by the scope of it.

Of course, I couldn’t resist leaving my own “artistic commentary” with a bit of silliness.

I had already done “graffiti” for a Scavenger Hunt, but it still amused me to have take the picture.  As I was turning away, though, my friend L, who had been visiting over the holiday said, “Is ‘mural’ a  Scavenger Hunt category?”

I knew it wasn’t – I had been looking over the list just that morning – but it could be. A mural is not graffiti, after all – it is sanctioned public artwork.

I climbed up the embankment to the top of the graffiti wall. “Ready?” I asked.  L grinned up at me, and snapped the picture.