by Georgia Laidlaw

Amidst the midterms and rainspurts of late October,

When the air cools and the skies darken,

It is hard to find Beauty.

I think on that one moment of Enlightenment

when I first started Walking.

It was sunny, and clear, and warm.

That was beautiful.

That was Beauty.

Four weeks and I tried again to enter that space –

To see that place of Beauty.

Walking like I was in the Pure Land,

or else somehow trying to transmute the mundane around me

into a land that was pure enough.

For me to be beautiful.

To transmute the concrete, steel, and glass of Capitalism,

And the incessant advertisements and ideas of others telling me what was beautiful,

to something that actually is…

I realized this was slightly futile.

The people who made these streets and steel towers built them to last.

To overshadow,

and carry their notions of beauty long into a future,

where my body and bones would already be in the ground-

Back in the arms of my Mother.

But it is okay for now.

Because I do not think that Beauty of mine had as much to do with the warm day and dawn,

As it did with the inner state,

in which I was somehow placed.

For what felt like the briefest of moments.

And I brushed by that state again,

albeit diluted, but surely the same,

in my Walking.

Just by walking,

I got closer and closer every week,

 on my Yoga mat at home.

Stepping with love and compassion and breath to the point where I felt,

as I dashed across the Bay-Bloor intersection late for a midterm test

(The epitome of mortal mud)

Lotus buds, sprouting in my wake.

Which means the world’s Beauty is always with me -Inside me.

And there is a way to be centered in that Beauty every moment of every day.

That’s where the Pure Land is.

I’m not there yet (far from).

But I at least found a way to do it.

As long as I keep Walking.