The Most Beautiful Place In The World

What is the most beautiful, memorable, breathtaking place you have ever been?  I ask myself this often, as I listen to others tell of their adventures, or as I reminisce about all the places I have visited.

I have been to the mountains and breathed in the rarefied thin, cold air that hurt the lungs with a deep breath and where I did not feel quite comfortable being there.  Yet there was a beauty that was amazing and awe-inspiring.  Standing on a mountaintop, you feel as if you can almost touch the heavens… or maybe that’s just the lack of oxygen that gives you that heady feeling.

Now, I live in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains.  They are hills, really.  Ancient, eroded, worn down.  Not mountains at all anymore.  They are covered with trees and are shady and cool in the hot months of our humid summers.  They offer protection, food, and shelter for a variety of wildlife.  The trees give us oxygen and make our space more comfortable and beautiful.  More liveable.

The desert is a place most people don’t think of when you ask about beauty.  But have you ever visited the Painted Desert? If you have never set and watched throughout the day how the sunlight plays over the bands of color, changing them before your very eyes, you are missing out on quite a show.  It is breathtaking!  It is the same with the Grand Canyon, that great chasm that wind and water have eroded to reveal the eons of time.  

Walking along the sandy beach is one of my favorite things to do. I was a young adult before I got the chance to visit the ocean and I was hooked from the very first moment!  I can spend hours walking along a beach, my feet just in the surf, feeling my toes sink into the soft sand.  Sinking, as if the earth will suck me right down into its depths.  Then as the water rushes away, I am standing on solid ground, my feet free of the sand and no trace of my footprints left behind.  Stoop to pick up a shell newly deposited on the sand.  Gaze out over the expanse at, sometimes, nothing but water.  I could do this all day!  And at night, the moon reflects back at itself in the clear water like a mirror, surrounded by a myriad of stars.  I am in heaven.

As a child in the flatlands, I have watched nature’s fury as a tornado ripped across the land.  And seen lighting bolts that seemed to last forever light up the sky.  There is beauty in even that.  

I have been to museums and galleries and botanical gardens and seen wonderful works of art, both manmade and those crafted by nature’s hand.  

But, when pressed to pick the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, I have to admit that I cannot choose.  We live on a fabulous big blue marble floating along in space.  This is our home.  And it is full of wondrous, awe-inspiring things.  If I lived to be a thousand, I don’t believe I could get enough of it!

Edna St.Vincent Milllay (my favorite poetess) says it much more eloquently than I.

God’s World

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!

Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!

Thy mists, that roll and rise!

Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag

And all but cry with colour!   That gaunt crag

To crush!   To lift the lean of that black bluff!

World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,

But never knew I this;

Here such a passion is

As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear

Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;

My soul is all but out of me,—let fall

No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

If you had to choose your favorite place, could you?  I’d love to hear what it is.