Beauty and the Tire

She was so lovely in the morning, all blue-green sweetness. How does anyone wake up looking so refreshed? 

Seriously. I gotta say, Queenstown Harbour is one gorgeous dame in the morning! I stood on a wall to take this picture… tripod and all. I wanted the whole kit’n kaboodle in the shot.
I also posted it on Google+. It got over 1000 +1’s over there and people seemed to genuinely like it.
But I waited for the tire complaints… annnd, sure enough… there they came. Alot of folks felt that this shot would be so much better without the damn tire. Hehheh. While I do understand the point, it made me chuckle.

When I was editing this photo, I tried a few different crops, including the one sans tire. But it was just another pretty picture. Too perfect, in fact. While I never thought I’d hear a Virgo say something is “too perfect”… I did, in fact, utter those words.

For me, the tire transforms the photo from a postcard into a story. It’s a story about how Beauty is seldom perfect… there is nearly always some flaw beneath the surface. True beauty is deep. It includes and embraces imperfections, because it’s the flaws that give us character, perspective, wisdom. When we embrace them – a transformation happens. It’s like when the clouds clear, or a pressure lessens… more light, more ease can rush in and open us up to all new possibilities. Things seem just a little more radiant and inviting than before. Too much perfection usually isn’t real. Embracing and transmuting our  so-called flaws and letting our light shine even brighter for having done so; that’s beauty in the truest sense. So on a personal level, that’s the short story of this image.

But there’s another reason I left the tire. It may seem counter to what I just said, but it’s not. It has to do with seeing what’s going on around us. Really seeing it. Someone dumped this tire in the harbor and left it there. They got away with it – and it sucks, because if you multiply a move like that by about a gillion… you’ve got the state of our planet right now. In this photo, I didn’t want to pretend that this thing hadn’t happened. The juxtaposition of  a friggin’ awful tire and the indescribable beauty of the scene, points straight to my “larger view” story within this image.

I take pretty pictures. I love finding beauty in my world and sharing it – because I have this faith that people will be moved in some way. Perhaps they’ll be inspired to take better care of themselves, to think differently about their life and their ability to create a great one, to maybe even consider all of creation and this gorgeous jewel of a planet that we all share in a new way.

Beauty loves to be treasured. She thrives and releases all of her gifts to us when she is loved and cared for. To leave out the tire would lessen the stakes before us and, I think, take beauty too much for granted.

We must never take Beauty for granted.