Five Photos Proving Beauty is Bigger Than #2020
In the waning weeks of 2020, the Great White North came to visit. In my almost-southern hometown, the magnolias and bamboo bowed low, showing deference to the weight of a year. 2020: It’s been heavy.
Before the snow came, I sat in our local adoration chapel, a thin place in this world where the silence speaks. There, I reviewed the year—COVID-19; the George Floyd protests; the presidency that will not end. I offered a few prayers for peace and resolution, and as I did, other things came to mind. The grace of confirmation. The trout stream. The beauty of Amber’s tiny garden. The Farm. The anniversary. The exquisite food. There’s been enough grace to go around.
There is a temptation to treat 2020 as its own sort of hashtag, a meme of all things negative. This, I perceive, gives the darkness too much weight. We are not bamboo. The world is not snow. Beautiful things are bigger when given their proper place.
What good have you seen in 2020? Reflect on it. Steep yourself in it. There is more beauty than horror in this human life, if only we’ll slow down long enough to see it.
A Piece of Art That Will Change Your Day
Last week, we explored beauty and art, how it shapes and molds the world around us. This weekend, I experienced the spiritual and emotional alchemical power of art firsthand. At a church in Rogers, Arkansas, Amber and I stumbled across a sculpture.*
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If Beauty Can Save the World
If beauty can save the world, where are you finding beauty? Are you even looking?
Grab a Copy and Wake Up
THE BOOK OF WAKING UP —a book on addiction, attachment, and the Divine Love—launched TUESDAY so order a copy or ten at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookish (my favorite indie bookseller). Then, forward this post to a friend and ask them to read along.
Birdsong: A Poem
Today’s post is a bit late. Apologies for the delay, but sometimes the day runs wild like horses in Montana.
Maybe beauty can save the world. Maybe it can’t. Whatever the case, the video I shared this week proves the truth: Beauty can break rocks. Today, enjoy a poem inspired by this week’s previous video.
Birdsong
In the church of St. Simon The Tanner,
the guardian of the Kura River,
a choir collected voices as
a passing of peace.
The West sent their Pope,
the East a black-haired girl,
young as the Virgin Mary,
small as a baby bird
until she sang.
Over the drones of her elders
she wailed, throat full of notes,
which rose and fell like
the breaths between sobs.
Her elder, a bearded man,
sang his offering too
and all measured it
an act of power meets power.
But the girl,
it is said by some,
was the water
that broke the Rock.
Grab a Copy and Wake Up
THE BOOK OF WAKING UP —a book on addiction, attachment, and the Divine Love—launched TUESDAY so order a copy or ten at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookish (my favorite indie bookseller). Then, forward this post to a friend and ask them to read along.
How Beauty is Saving a Friend
Over coffee, we cut loose on the stuff of life: the news; marriage; children; art; the journey into or out of faith as the case may be. We talked about the creeping despair in America, too, how I’d had two acquaintances who’d passed in the last 14 days, perhaps by their own hands. “Precarity,” he said, “is baked into everything these days: the economy; the ways we make money as freelancers; the family; life.”
I rolled his statement over again, played it back in my head. Precarity. That’s an apt way to put it.
He looked at his camera (a camera that he loves and I covet), then said, “This thing might have saved my life.” The pursuit of art opened his eyes to the beautiful stuff of the world, to the people staring down the barrel of his lens. He collects those people, those places, those tiny snapshots of life and considers them, smiles at them, sometimes posts them on Instagram for others. It’s this art that serves as a hedge against his own despair, against the precarity that is the genesis of that despair.
Can beauty save the world as St. John Paul II and Dostoyevsky’s idiot claimed? Maybe not. But it can save a middle-aged man or two. And these days, that’s enough for me.
Life Examined: Curating Beauty
Are you practicing your own artistic curation somewhere? Are you resisting despair through beauty? I create photography (and sometimes share it online).
Grab a Copy and Wake Up
THE BOOK OF WAKING UP —a book on addiction, attachment, and the Divine Love—launched TUESDAY so order a copy or ten at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookish (my favorite indie bookseller). Then, forward this post to a friend and ask them to read along.
Email readers, you’ll want to follow this link to watch this video.
How Beauty Brings Power to Tears
Break with technology and backfill the time with beauty—that’s the call of the week.
Yesterday, while traveling, I searched for beauty, and it came in the form of an email from my friend and fellow-writer, Lore Ferguson Wilbert. It was an email filled with links, each meant to pull the reader into a more sensory experience. She wrote:
To help you engage all your senses (which is part of waking up), I listened to this four-minute masterpiece this morning and by the end was gulping back tears. The Sound of Hagia Sophia, more than 500 years ago.
I lost myself in the haunting and holy beauty of the clip, and after those four minutes were over, I recalled a video I’d seen years ago. In it, the Holy Father sat in a Tbilisi church as an Orthodox choir sang Psalm 53 over him. The drones from that choir are enough to bring you to your knees, but when the child lifts her voice in lament, spirits bend low, listening.
If Dostoyevsky and John Paul II are right, if beauty can save the world, this music might be salvific.
Life Examined: The Search for Beauty
Where did you find beauty yesterday? If you didn’t, did you look?
Grab a Copy and Wake Up
THE BOOK OF WAKING UP —a book on addiction, attachment, and the Divine Love—launched TUESDAY so order a copy or ten at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookish (my favorite indie bookseller). Then, forward this post to a friend and ask them to read along.
Let Beauty Be Your Distraction, Your Reprieve
Up before dawn. Cranking out a report. Sending three emails. Locking in the day’s tasks. Orienting myself to the work. All before prayer or meditation. This was my morning.
Today is already burning at both ends, and if you live in this modern miracle of Western civilization (which is to say if you are not a ghost), your day might be too. Always burning, always on fire. But perpetual fire burns things to the ground, and a life of constant conflagration isn’t sustainable.
Today, take a break from this endless burn. How? Take a break, and instead of turning to distraction (to social media, for instance), turn to beauty. Carve out ten minutes and:
play a beautiful piece of music, closing your eyes as you listen;
read a poem, perhaps “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke;
look for art in the world around you, perhaps on the side of a building or an office wall;
get into nature and find something astounding.
“Beauty will save the world,” Dostoyevsky and St. John Paul II. And as I look at my own burning life and the lives of those burning around me, I suspect we could all use a little saving. Today, find a little beauty and cherish it.
Grab a Copy and Wake Up
THE BOOK OF WAKING UP —a book on addiction, attachment, and the Divine Love—launched TUESDAY so order a copy or ten at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookish (my favorite indie bookseller). Then, forward this post to a friend and ask them to read along.
Waking: Living Into the Light (Week 2)
I’ve continued my exploration of the timeless maxim on the temple of Delphi—Know Thyself, and yesterday, I turned back to the first three “Know Thyself” lists I asked you to create. (Those lists: your values, your skills, and the things that bring you joy.) But knowing yourself, formulating these lists—what’s the point?
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