Found while sitting in a cemetery:

Juliana Hodowansky Cooley
Beloved wife of Charles
Mother of Joy and Regan
Lover of beauty

Who was she, this lover of beauty?  What was her life like? What did beauty mean to her, where did it come from, how did she share it with others?

I'm sitting on a bench beside her grave, in a patch of sun. It is a hopeful, young, spring day. Crows and geese and smaller birds are filling the air with their conversations. The bench is on a hill overlooking a clearing. The field is ringed by a brook, which somewhere behind me tumbles gently over a shallow waterfall. There is a pond, still tentatively covered with the sheerest films of ice. Dotted around the meadow, at the pond, and here, on the hill, are large white crosses with little markers - the Stations of the Cross of Our Lord's passion and death.

Buffering this place of retreat from the world beyond is a thick wood, which gives way to the escarpment. I can faintly hear the urban sounds of traffic, but it is a distant backdrop to the chattering birds, little creatures scurrying through the leaves of last fall, and branches whispering in the breeze.

The natural beauty of this place encourages and fosters the peace I came here to find.

My thanks to Juliana Cooley for sharing this moment with me.  May she rest in eternal Beauty.