Inside Things

          Take a child to an apple tree and pick an apple. Cut it horizontally and open the broken halves. Look! Do you see the secret star inside? The child's delight will reinforce your own sense of wonder at the beauty inside things of nature.

         Beauty, of course, is everywhere in nature, but the hidden beauties—the patterns and surprises inside things—are the best of all. When I was a child, my father cut a pine cone lengthwise. Look! Inside! Another tree, with a trunk tapering towards its top and branches to the sides.

          A geode is boring on the outside—rough in texture, dull in color, interesting only in being unusually round. Break it open and find purple crystals rising like teeth in the mouth of a sea monster or clustering like petrified forms of the swaying tentacles of an anemone.

          The wonder elicited by the beauty of crystalline teeth inside a geode is enhanced by what the imagination does with the slightly menacing image of a sea monster, but when my leg slipped into a crevasse when I was mountain-climbing in the Alps and I looked down into the inside of a glacier, the danger was real but the beauty so surprising it blinded fear. The depth was unimaginable. As it plunged, the inside of the glacier echoed a deeper and deeper blue, from light-brightened turquoise to light-deprived turquoise and on beyond where I could tell what color it was. The color inside snow was as surprising as crystals inside a rock or a star in an apple, so surprising and so beautiful I never thought of the danger I might have been in. But maybe I had the luxury of not paying attention to the danger because I was roped to my companions. Or maybe I saw only the beauty because I was twenty years old and unaware of mortality. Whatever the reason I was able to concentrate on the beauty inside a glacier, I am grateful for it.

          Everything has something inside. Inside a seed is a tree; inside a bud is a flower. Inside a raindrop is a rainbow. Inside your eyes is your soul. Maybe a bear becomes angry if you look him in the eye because he doesn't want you to see inside his bare soul. A dog, on the other hand, has such confidence in his dogness he will beg you to look inside his eyes. When I looked at an owl through my binoculars, straight into his big owl eyes, he stared back into mine, then flew away and didn't return to the tree outside my bedroom for years. Was it what he saw in me or what he didn't want me to see in him that kept him away? His privacy? Or my rudeness?

         I could, if I wanted, reveal what's inside my heart, but how could I even know what's inside a bucketful of stars? What wonders of color or pattern might be inside a grain of sand? Look deep, look deeper, look deeper still: the beauty inside of things has no end.