What's Shakin'?

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach.
One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if
they are few...
Gradually one discards and keeps just the perfect specimen; not
necessarily a rare shell, but a perfect one of it's kind.
One sets it apart by itself, ringed around by space- like an island.
For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.
Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant- and therefore beautiful.
A tree has a significance from the silences on either side.
A candle flowers in the space of night.
Even small and casual things take on significance if they are washed
in space like a few autumn grasses in one corner of an Oriental painting,
the rest of the page bare.
For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures- an excess of shells, where one or two would be significant.

-Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea- 1955

I love reading this. Sometimes, less is more, isn't it?