Episode 217: Hosts Richard Kyte and Scott Rada tackle a subject that’s easy to overlook — beauty. Not the kind of beauty sold in store aisles or filtered through a cellphone, but the kind that stops us in our tracks and makes us forget, for just a moment, about ourselves.

Kyte recalls a recent camping trip during which he stumbled upon a scene so stunning that he instinctively reached for his phone — only to realize he’d left it behind. What followed, he says, was an experience of pure presence: sunbeams slicing through lifting fog, the quiet steps of deer and the realization that no photograph could ever do it justice.

That moment becomes the starting point for a conversation about how beauty reshapes our sense of meaning and morality. “We spend so much time in our own heads,” Kyte said. “Beauty reminds us there’s something significant outside ourselves.”

It’s an idea that stretches from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays on nature to Iris Murdoch’s notion of “unselfing” — the idea that paying attention to something beyond our own desires is the first step toward living ethically.

Rada connects those philosophical ideas to everyday life — including the digital habits that make true attention harder to find. He wonders whether seeing a beautiful image on a four-inch screen counts as the same kind of experience. Kyte doesn’t dismiss the value of photography but insists that beauty can’t be possessed, only encountered.

“The moment we try to capture it, we risk losing it,” he said.

The discussion ranges from foggy forests to still-life paintings, from Emerson’s influence on John Muir to the idea that even the way we see other people changes when we cultivate reverence. Along the way, the hosts wrestle with one provocative question: If we begin to see beauty everywhere, does it still feel extraordinary?