“Beauty” is a corrupted word. We’re too ready to define it according to ideals of perfection: a stick-thin figure, a complex concerto, or summer sunshine untainted by clouds. However, when we look closely at our world, beauty, as defined by nature, is much more subtle. A person who does not fit the modern aesthetic standard is beautiful because of the utter joy in their face when they smile. A song that is imperfect because of its simplicity is beautiful when the audience catches their breath after one note and relaxes at hearing the next. And a winter morning that is imperfect because of its biting temperature is truly beautiful for the fresh, cold air that rushes through your being, causing you to rejoice at the glory of being alive.

Over the summer, my family traveled to London, home of the Globe Theatre and Sherlock Holmes. Keeping with the motto “carpe diem,” we did not wait for our hotel room to be ready, but instead dropped off our bags and swung out into the streets bereft even of a map.

Our first destination was Hyde Park, an enormous expanse of soft grass, trees, lakes, flowers, and popsicles – basically, pure paradise for the weary traveler. Better still, one could rent a bicycle for 30 minutes for only one pound, or less than $2. While my parents pondered the bikes, I wandered off into the cool shade of a small copse of trees.

Where the branches spread and interwove their bright leaves, the sun filtered through in fragments. As I looked up, my bleary eyes dissolved the trees into thousands of bits of light, glimmering and winking at me in shades of green.

As I stood before the majesty of something only nature could have created, it felt like so much more than trees. It felt like something primordial had been unearthed. The ground I was standing on became sacred earth, the floor of the immense cathedral of Mother Nature. The glistening points became panes in an enormous stained glass window, looking into a shimmering world I could not reach.

I could only be brought back to the surface by my mother’s voice. As I walked, dazed, back to my family, I realized I was not planning to tell them what I had experienced. The spoken and written word cannot do the moment justice. I realized that happenings of this sort had to be found alone, without the help of others.

Half of the joy in finding these gold mines is the knowledge that of all people on earth, you have stumbled across these treasures, these shimmers in the darkness. It feels as though you’ve been singled out by the gods to be graced with such a gift. It wouldn’t be the same for anyone else. And so, when my mother asked me what I had been looking at, I smiled and said, “Nothing.”

Weeks after we had returned to sunny California, my second-oldest cousin came home after a year in Oman. My family’s tight circle of seven cousins was complete once more, so we decided to go night swimming, a tradition that hadn’t been the same with only six. We swam and ducked and jumped into the shallow end. The boys wrestled while the girls pretended to be mermaids (only for old time’s sake, of course). The cousin just above me in age tried to teach me how to blow bubble rings, but that art requires one to face the sky while underwater, bending one’s back in a position that I could not endure.

Finally, I swam to one of the walls, rested my legs on the edge, and let my body fall into the smooth embrace of the water. Looking up, I found not the sky, but another shimmer.

The water distorted the night sky and its frame of pine trees into another world, one that rippled and wavered, as if I was staring at the pool’s surface from the side. Somehow I felt convinced I was not in water but in air, and that if I thrust my hand through the paper-thin surface between the two worlds, I would feel water. Slowly I raised my hand and felt the tips of my fingers emerge through the glassy sheet into clean, cool air.

The beauty and confusion of it all threw me into a dizzy whirl. There was another world in the water, I was sure, and yet whenever I tried to break through, I was once again in the surface world. Everything I saw was only a glimpse offered of horizons mortals could not reach.

As I lifted myself out of the water, my cousin asked eagerly, “Could you do it?” Even as I shook my head, I didn’t know whether I meant shattering the glass between the two worlds or blowing bubble rings.

I could not find my way into those glowing worlds through the small windows shown me. I could not find my way into that natural beauty. And yet there was something comforting and strangely beautiful in knowing that it was safe from human hands. It would always be there, just out of reach, for dreaming of and drinking in. It was hope, it was beauty, it was there.

These shimmers are in the broken world around us, small feathers of light drifting through cracks in the ebony skies. They remind us of what we’ve lost since those idle days in the Garden of Eden, and they tell us what we must strive to create in our world. It is the beauty of the unattainable that keeps us running toward the sunset, keeps us looking for the gold at the end of the rainbow. To this day, I keep my eyes open, looking for the shimmers.