I am not much given to tears, not ordinarily anyway. For joy? Yes. I can, and sometimes do, cry for joy. Grief and sorrow? We all can cry over them. We all do. And beauty. Always for beauty. But the truth of the thing is that I don't have a definition for beauty. Neither, of course, do philosophers or aestheticians, when one gets right down to it. In fact, with beauty, almost all of us have to fall back into the tired old saw of "I don't know how to describe it, but I know it when I see it."

With beauty, that trite saying means for me that I recognize immediately the strange stillness that always surrounds beauty, like an opening in space and time, making a corona or aura around it. I know by perceived sensation the way beauty goes straight to my thorax when it enters me, rising only later, if at all, to my head. I know the union I feel, if just for a few moments, with all things when I am in the presence of beauty. And I know that beauty makes me tear up just for the wonder of its being possible -  just for the sheer miracle that the stuff of creation can be so arranged as to become this that I receive as beauty.

Phyllis Tickle (in her forward to Jesus Brand Spirituality by Ken Wilson)