There are two kinds of beauty in this world. There’s surface beauty, which is skin deep and gradually erodes with time until it’s gone. Then there’s the other kind: the beauty that’s deeper, the type that endures and inspires.
This deeper beauty is the kindness of the stranger who pulls over to help someone with a flat tire. It's the compassion of the hospice nurse who holds the hand of a dying patient. It's the selflessness of the firefighter who runs into a building engulfed in flames. It's the love of the daughter who drops everything to help her elderly mother.
The mystic Sufi poet Rumi expressed it succinctly when he said, “The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart.”
With each passing year, the beauty that captivates me more and more is the beauty of the heart. Everything else – the clothes, the hair, all the trappings of physical appeal – is just bark on the tree: a surface covering that conceals the deeper beauty underneath.
Photographer’s Footnote: This is part of a series of photos I took during a recent one-hour walk in Freedom Park near our house in Charlotte.