Category: Non-Fiction

I meander through a terrain of browns and greens amid a dappled blue and white sky. My fingers brush tall grasses and wild flowers still wet with morning dew. I hear a symphony of birdsong and inhale the scent of pine wafting on a fresh breeze.

In the afternoon, sunlight hits the clear water and the rocks underneath, coloring them golden. When I gaze at the spot and then turn to look further upstream, where some Sierra peak stands in the background, I know this soars to the spiritual realm that classifies as beauty, because every way I try to describe it misses the mark.

Beauty is kindness. It it the boy that holds out his hand to the bullied child on the playground. It is the man who buys lunch for the homeless. It is woman who rescues animals. The parents that open their hearts to an orphan. The community that embraces refugees. The girl who raises her voice to protect the weak. Beauty is the smiles that are sustained during the storm.

Beauty attracts. And not just organic forms of beauty. The motion and reflective properties of water; the arresting formations assumed by igneous rock; the vague, protean fleece or domes of cloud, the variable and mysterious lights in the night sky, and the regular rise and fall of ocean waves approaching the shore.

In my youth I was forever moved by Leonard Cohen’s poem, “Suzanne.” I wanted to be her, to be the one who showed others where to look for beauty in the garbage and the seaweed. Because I saw it, too. More than three decades later, I am still blinded by the beautiful in chaos, in clutter, in the flawed, the noisy, and the broken.