Beauty: A Leap Day Letter
Is 2020 really the year we need an extra day? All signs point to: perhaps not.
Unless...amidst the primaries, pandemics, and practical realities of being a person in the world, I can use it to come back around to thinking about beauty. Both the beauty that pleases the aesthetic senses, and the beauty that pleases the intellectual and moral senses.
There's the natural beauty of poppies by the highway along coastal CA, snow on the mountains in UT, a hawk on the light pole we drive under several times a week, the hoot of the owl outside our window in the suburbs of SF. The way the songbirds in my in-laws' yard wait in the juniper for us to turn our backs, when they'll flit to the feeder and then disappear again when we try to look.
There's the beauty of the educators in my life: My sister in her job as a public elementary school principal in a struggling neighborhood, keeping dozens of plates spinning where the work of human compassion and educational administration intersect and, often, collide. The beauty of my mother's work in her community as an educator and mentor and citizen, working with people on the margins in so many ways. And in my husband's job as a high school teacher when he's modeling humility and attention. In my sister-in-law's and niece's classrooms where kids are loved while they're taught.
I see beauty in the hospitality my mother-in-law and father-in-law show every day to each other after sixty years of marriage--moving on quickly and with good humor from the little scuffles and frustrations of a long life together sharing everything. And in the hospitality of opening their home to us and doing it with that same good humor and kindness.
I'm moved by the beauty in well-told stories. I recently read Varian Johnson's The Parker Inheritance, an epic middle grade novel so infused with love that I tear up just thinking about it. I've been reading Jia Tolentino's essays, Trick Mirror, since last year--about one a month to give myself proper time for each. They aren't the feel-good kind of beautiful, unless you believe that rigorous logic and crystal-clear critical thinking are beautiful, which I do.
The podcast "You're Wrong About" tells some of the least beautiful stories of our times, but there is this deep compassion in the way the hosts Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes look at these stories from new and careful angles, and in their obvious affection for one another and the joy they take in doing this project together.
I'm thinking about a lot of other beauty: public libraries, advocates for the unhoused, the view from the train ride I took along the central coast last week, fog, a well-timed text that makes me laugh, potatoes and everything you can do with them, the little acts of patience shown by front-line workers in every type of business and organizational enterprise.
I think of these lines from Max Ehrmann's "Desiderata":
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.
He wrote this famous prose poem when he was 49, basically as one of those Christmas/year-end updates you send to all your friends and family. It was 1933, and things weren't great for a lot of people. It amuses me to imagine being one of Max's friends in receipt of his holiday letter.
"Max is telling us how to feel again," I might say, waving the letter at my husband with an eyeroll. And I might also say, "What about death? What about injustice? What about suffering? What about that, MAX?"
But then I'd look up at the stars or at a perfect avocado or into the eyes of a loved one, and...I'd have to basically agree.
It's still a beautiful world. And sometimes we do need an extra day to remember.
Meanwhile...
Read my latest on Medium about diet culture and living in the present (this is a friends link that gets you past the paywall - feel free to share)
Pre-order Goodbye from Nowhere - out April 7!
Check out the great cover for Courageous Creativity, also available for pre-order but this one won't drop until late September, so you have time to hear more about it - I promise I will tell you soon.