Growing Old: a follow-up to Rust Never Sleeps / glowbegone

"Yeah, yeah, yeah....  she finds beauty in the ordinary....  but in old, rusty things, too??"

When I was gathering images for my Rust Never Sleeps posting, I came across a few from a file I labeled "glowbegone".  I recall being in a really bad mood one day and I stepped outside with my camera with the purpose of finding the most ugliest things around the property that I could find--dirty, old cans that once contained some kind of fuel that were covered in dirt where the drippings once dripped....  the old burning barrel that now can't even hold an ash....  an old birdbath that was green with slime....  the uglier, the better.  Snap, snap snap.  But when my mood lifted and I reviewed the images, I saw that even in the ugly, there was beauty!  (a true optimist at heart!)

I recall this like it was yesterday:  Over 20 years ago, I worked with a woman who taught me a lesson (and vice versa) about how things age.  It was this time of year, when the air was crisp and leaves were falling.  The assignment was for the children to go out in the playground and gather leaves for an art project.  One child picked up a brown oak leaf that had been lying on the ground for some time--the edges had begun to fold up, pieces of the leaf crumbled and withered away, leaving just a stem with brown lacey remnants, and the 'teacher' said to the child, "Put that one down--it's old and it's not pretty; we want fresh, colorful leaves that aren't broken."  At first I thought 'How dare she put her own value on what she might find pretty or not on this child, who is just beginning to form her own ideas of value??!!'  And then it occured to me, the message that might also come across:  'What?  When things get old, they lose their beauty??'  Needless to say, without saying a word, I picked up every damn leaf I could find that was just as 'old and not pretty' as the one the child found and sat down beside the children and used those leaves for my own art project.

Those rusty, old objects I found on my walk--the same walk along the path as the 'pretty things' in the previous post--had such an appeal to me.  The colors alone, are something you could never get from a can, I don't care how sophisticated today's paint-mixing equipment might be.  And as far as the objects being cast aside in this meadow along the river--they once served their purpose, working hard in the fields of life--they deserve to just sit and rest and just 'be'......

It makes me look at myself and those around me....  our own hair now a bit 'rusty' with silver... 
our bodies becoming more fragile or even begin to break apart...  but each line on our face and the patina of our hair only adds character to who we are.  Our beauty doesn't disappear--it just changes.