#1: What is Beauty?

Beauty is not so much something that is aesthetically pleasing - these things are simply given the name "beautiful." Beauty is the force within us that lends its own name to all that aligns with good, pure, lovely, and free. Beauty can be simple or complex, small or huge, pleasurable or painful. While it is gloriously unique within each person, beauty has some universal factors that are found beautiful by all, and beauty's function is to boast of a Creator. Truly beautiful things whisper, "This is not an accident."

An example of something I find beautiful is mountains. Mountains are beautiful to me uniquely - as an artist, I appreciate artistic elements that show up in mountainous landscapes such as atmospheric perspective and silhouette. But mountains, in their hugeness and majesty, also hold universal beauty in their size and strength.

After reading the other students' reflections on beauty, I stand by my definition of beauty, but also desire to understand how other individuals define it. There is still a universal quality to beauty, but the diverse facets of its subjectivity are worth investigating to understand beauty more fully and to understand one another.