8th Day of Christmas

Merry Christmas, Day 8!  Happy New Year!
This picture was taken at the same time as yesterday's.  They are both a great way to start a new year focusing on beauty.  (Clicking on the picture enlarges it.)
My Ministry of the Arts calendar for today quotes Eleanor Roosevelt,  "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
The bottom of the January page begins a quote from St. Augustine. Here's the translation that I know:   "Late have I loved you, Beauty ever ancient and ever new, late have I loved you.  You were within, but I was without.  You were with me, but I was not with you.  So you called, you shouted, you broke through my deafness, you flared, blazed, and banished my blindness, you lavished your fragrance, and I gasped."
Perhaps the most challenging and hopeful book that I read this past year was Gregory Wolfe's Beauty Will Save The World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age.  "Beauty will save the world." is a quote from Dostoevsky's The Idiot.   Wolfe points out that Aleksandr Solzhenitzen referred to it in his "Nobel Lecture."  It was a favorite quote of Dorothy Day, who loved the Russian novelists.  Michael McGrath called his book about Dorothy Day, Saved by Beauty.
I live surrounded by beauty, as these two pictures make vividly clear.  So it is Beauty who seems to be calling for my attention this year.  I will do my best to study Gregory Wolfe's book and share what I can.