Kaleidoscope

When I was young I fell in love with a handmade kaleidoscope. I don't remember the artist that made it, however, i do remember it was at the Santa Monica Pier Art Show. Hand painted a high gloss black with purple drips resembling that of designs in your latte foam at your favorite gourmet coffee shop.

The outside was nice, but the inside! Oh the inside was beautiful! Perfection every time i looked into it. The most brilliant seashells ever. All so exotic, so unique and small enough to fit into the cylindrical container that magnified the stunning vision to the X number. He didn't pick the shells by handful and toss them in. NO! I could tell that these shells were especially picked for this scope. Connecting the inside with it's outside. The creator mindfully designed the meaning of this very simple toy to work as one and reflect as one. Like a god creating the perfect man or woman, he created each one with a different personality, a different wit and a different soul. He made a new life out of remains of what was once living.

Far better than any video game or plastic tit-kabob doll. It was nature dancing in circles in unique patterns that never repeated themselves. Always something new to look at and always beautiful. SO simple, so amazing and such a rare instrument.

I have it til this day. I've caught myself crying just holding it in my hands. Because really, how simple is the true beauty in life? They tell us to stop and smell the flowers. But who are they? And do we really know what they are talking about? Most assume it's a moment where we can slow down? Perhaps we have it all wrong. Slowing down is not stopping. It means you are still moving but slower, and even that is relative to how fast we are use to living our life. No, stopping mean just that. Stopping cannot be relative, it's a definitive. It's a point in time where one is forced to observe and hopefully reevaluate everything around them. Standing there, kaleidoscope in hand, and simply allowing yourself to experience true moments of beauty. To find it in the midst of all that is wrong around us and isolate it from the bad and evil that has us running in circles that are far less beautiful than the inside of a kaleidoscope.

Maybe, if we all practiced on our own kaleidoscopes, we would be better observers of people and life. Maybe we would be better? Maybe we would see clearer and spend less time making mistakes because we were too caught up in societies standards of when we should be getting married, having babies, and careers.We should be more selective of those we let inside our lives, our hearts, our cylinder. There is something to be said for those that can stop and admire the simple beauty around them and understand what they are looking at. Those that take the time to cry over a kaleidoscope, I suppose, as if it were human.