When Your Spirits are Low, I Wish You Beauty

February 3rd, 2008

The following is from the book Plays with Fire read this past weekend. He shared the following with me not knowing what I wrote about last Thursday. The boy in the excerpt has recently escaped from an Eastern Europe prison camp. While tentatively learning how to trust people again, he clings tenaciously to the one thing that is helping his soul mend–beauty.

The woman said he could set the table while she prepared a meal for them–if he could manage it, that is. But he was not to break anything.

It was fun. The children had often said something was fun, and David had never quite understood what they meant. But being left alone in a beautiful room to find the right things to put on the table and setting them out to his liking–that was certainly fun.

“Heaven preserve us!” exclaimed the woman as she came in. David had not been able to find a white cloth, nor were there any silver plates to put under the ones you ate from. But he had discovered a piece of cloth the color of the mountains where he had lived by the sea–something between red and brown. The woman had attractive plates, and her knives and forks were silver. She had beautiful fine glassware, too, tucked away at the back of a cupboard, and David had placed one of the two candlesticks from the chest of drawers at one end of the table. And there was a black bowl, beautifully shaped, which David had set beside the candlestick. He had picked a pink flower from outside the window and laid it in the bowl.

“Where did you learn to set a table, young man?”

David looked at her. “I like it to look pretty–I mean beautiful, when I eat,” he said seriously.

“I beg your pardon, I’d no intention of being nosy, and you’re perfectly right: what one does every day should be done beautifully, It’s very sensible and proper.”– North to Freedom by Anne Holm

Do you let simple beauty do its work on your soul?

Entry Filed under: Tea Reads