Is There Beauty in Darkness?

    Ever find it hard to see anything beautiful during a dark time? I’ve struggled with that since the sudden, unexplained death of our six-year-old granddaughter this year - nothing but pain and sadness. So I’ve held onto a story I learned about Robert, a father scrambling to provide for his family early in the Twentieth Century. He’d attempted various jobs that produced nothing but poverty. At Christmas he tried earning money at a fair to buy presents, but failed. On his way home to his farmhouse late that night, he stopped his horse by the woods. With miles to go before he slept, he could freeze under a blanket of snow on this darkest night of the year.     
     Seventeen years later. Robert Frost stepped outside his stone farmhouse into a radiant sunrise in the lightest time of the year. His mind traveled back to that bleak night. But now, Frost recalled the brush of easy wind and downy flake - beauty!     
     He hurried inside to his dining room table, and in twenty minutes penned “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It’s perhaps the most famous poem of the Twentieth Century, calling us to search for loveliness in our darkness.     
     We all face bitter-cold journeys in life. I’m thinking that, as Frost discovered, I won’t find beauty in my circumstances, but instead in my setting. It’s in the hug of a friend. Or a meal dropped off to sustain us. Or the quiet look from someone who understands. That’s beauty in darkness.     
​     Frost’s poem is here.