Shortly before I was about to leave for the pilgrimage I mentioned in the last post, I read Brandi’s suggestion that we look for beauty in unexpected places.  “Perfect!” I thought. “The flat prairies, my dad’s grave – there will be lots of beauty in places where others might see none.”

On the highway outside my hometown, I stopped at the site where my dad died.  He was killed in a horrible road-side tractor accident.  Lying in an unremarkable ditch, with a summer storm moving in, he breathed his last breath.

First I snapped a picture of the rough wooden cross my husband had erected in Dad’s honour, and then, as I looked around, it gradually dawned on me what an abundance of beauty I could find in that one spot in a ditch. Rusty barbed wire, tired bulrushes, drying rose hips… the list goes on and on.  In the place that produced some of the greatest pain of my life, there were endless bits of eye candy for me and my camera.

All of the photos in this little slide show were taken within 10 feet of the place where my dad died or the place where he is buried (a few miles away in an unremarkable small-town prairie graveyard).

What a liberating, life-giving experiment that was! I could have taken hundreds more (and as it was, I couldn’t use nearly all of the ones I took). The more you look for beauty, the more you find it – in the bark on the trees, the tiny ants climbing along the branch, the brown-eyed susan missing its petals.

In so many ways, this exercise was the perfect way to honour Dad. If there was one person who taught me to find beauty in ordinary things, it was my dad. Every Spring, he wrote “Frogs” on the calendar to commemorate the first time he heard their unmistakable ribbets in the ditch. The lowly dandelion was his favourite flower and he didn’t understand why its beauty was so overlooked. He would burst into the house some days and call us out into the yard because we HAD to see a new calf or litter of piglets that had just been born. This is one of the last pictures he took (in a film we found and had developed a couple of years after his death) and one of my most treasured images – his shadow falling across his favourite flower.

Dandelions and the shadow of my dad

There is good reason why a raucous bouquet of wild flowers in a re-purposed bottle was the only thing I could bring to Dad’s grave (you can see it in the slide show).  It’s the only thing he would have wanted, and the only way I ever remember him bringing Mom flowers.

By most accounts, my dad didn’t live a “successful” life – he was a poor farmer who probably could have been a writer or professor or artist. But he raised four children who are all artists in their own ways, and he instilled in each of us the ability to see beauty in ordinary things and ordinary people.  He touched an incredible number of people in his own simple introverted way. The week before he died, literally hundreds of people came to share with us how dad had impacted them. Some stories were as simple as “it meant so much that he stopped to change my flat tire in the rain” and others were as profound as “something he said to me was so transformational that it changed my life.”

Yes, it’s a wonderful thing to be able to make a living out of your art or other giftedness, but what’s even more important is that you look at life through artful and compassionate eyes, marveling at beauty in ordinary things, reflecting back to people the beauty you see in them, and touching people in whatever ways you can.

In all those ways, my dad lived a successful life.

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