It is a beautiful morning in the Pioneer Valley. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and everywhere you look, people are mowing, raking, hoeing, digging, weeding, walking, biking, jogging, and otherwise enjoying themselves on this mild spring morning.

I am unfortunately not one of those people, but I do have a window behind me with a lovely view of a parking lot, and a few trees. The sunshine is filtering through the spring leaves and creating lovely shadows on the ground. It’s no hammock, but it’ll do.

During my drive to work this morning, I was thinking about beauty as it relates to creation. Often when we think of something as “beautiful”, we think of beauty as an inherent property of that object or scene. A sunset is beautiful. A flowering tree is beautiful. A rainbow after a summer storm is beautiful. So on and so forth. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I know that I get indignant when someone I’m with cannot see the beauty I can. My brother is a perfect example; I look at a flowering field and am nearly blown over in awe, but he can look at the same field and see nothing but ugly weeds. I find it extremely frustrating.

The truth is, beauty is entirely subjective. Nothing is beautiful in and of itself; instead, we create the beauty we see in the world by experiencing it as such. Even natural phenomenon such as rain, trees, waterfalls, stars and lightning are not beautiful in their own right - we allow ourselves to experience them as beautiful when we let ourselves look at them with new eyes each time. A rainbow is “just” a rainbow if we let each rainbow represent the idea of a rainbow. “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” as they say. But a rainbow is never “just” a rainbow when you see each rainbow for what it is - a brilliant new experience each time. The beauty we see comes not from the outside world, but from inside us.

The joy we feel when we create beauty in such a way is contagious, to those who are open to the experience of awe. But too often, people close themselves off from these feelings, and choose to see the world as commonplace. When we get bored of what we see when we look around us, it becomes difficult to see anything as particularly beautiful. I think we have all been in places that have an aura of misery about them, where the buildings were ugly, the only life was scrawny weeds and struggling trees and overgrown, stringy grass, and the people all seem worn down. I think places like this are suffering from too little beauty, or rather, too few people who know how to create it. I don’t mean by painting murals or planting flowers, per say. These things help, but what really creates the beauty is the enthusiasm of the people, the joy they feel, and the desire. Beauty can never be created through a feeling of obligation. Recently, a new set of murals was unveiled in downtown Amherst, and while the art itself was crude in places, what really shone through for me was the happiness felt by the artists who contributed, the bright colors almost shimmering with joyful energy.

This is the sort of joy I want to spread through my creations. I want to make things that inspire people to feel joyful, and forget their worries for a moment. I want to create items that people can admire - a glint of light shining through a bead, or a cozy scarf in warm, bright colors - and feel a sense of peace, of serenity.