Let’s Start with Beauty

This week, I experienced a stunningly Beautiful moment.

I was driving through the Indiana countryside after three months of barely leaving my apartment in Chicago. My two cats were in carriers in the backseat, having mostly slept for the past two hours. It had been flat Interstate for ages, but now we were rolling through fields, some with tiny shoots coming up in tight rows, some bare and scraggly with the bones of last year’s corn.

Suddenly to my left was a field covered in the brightest yellow flowers I’d ever seen. Yellow after yellow, bordered with spikey green grass and soft ground cover. And it’s May, so this green is deep, but still young and vibrant. And the sky was as blue as it gets, with a few fluffy pure-white clouds, some of them pregnant with a band of dark gray that might later become rain over other fields to the east.

All of the colors were sharp and bright and perfect.

This was Yellow. There could be no yellow more Yellow than those flowers.

The blue, the green, the white, the gray, they all seemed to be the purest possible form of each color. The essence of them, somehow. If colors had souls.

*             *             *

When I ask people about Beauty, they often describe a nature experience, usually with a bit of rapture and awe in their voices.

We’ve only lived in cities and towns for the blink of an eye. Humanity was born out of nature, and the deepest parts of us still remember it, not as a place we visit, but as the very heart of ourselves.

This moment, driving through the fields of central Indiana, I wanted to stop and take a picture. To try to capture a small part of the Beauty I had stumbled across, so I could show it to you, and maybe you could experience a fraction of it for yourselves. I actually saw another car stopped at the cross street, the driver standing up out of the car window, angling his phone for the perfect shot. You don’t see that so often on SR26.

I didn’t stop. Because this moment was not just Beautiful, it was also True. And the truth was that my tuxedo cat Fern had just gotten loudly carsick all over herself thirty seconds before the field of butterweed flowers, and I was only 15 minutes from home. She needed help, so I rolled on.

This part of the moment is True, not because of the fact of her barfing, but because it was a moment of great joy, with just a tiny drop of sorrow in it. And THAT is both Beautiful and True for me. Joy with a tiny drop of sorrow. Or the opposite, moments of grief that also contain seeds of bright joy.

If you’re old enough, you might remember the climax of Steel Magnolias. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. If you have, you probably already know where I’m going. The cemetery scene. M’lynn, overcome with grief and rage. Ousier’s offer. A sudden burst of rioutous laughter that cuts through the despair and reminds M’lynn and the other women and all of us that friendship is still real and that there is some good, even in in the depths of horrible pain.

Those moments are Beautiful and True for me.

So, having my breath taken away unexpectedly by a field I’d driving past hundreds of times, coupled with the urgency of a slightly ill cat—that moment, both realities together, was Beautiful and True.

The things that are Beautiful or True—or both—don’t always have to be big. They usually aren’t. They’re often everyday and simple.

If we allow ourselves the possibility that they exist, we start to see them more and more.

The people I know who are living the richest lives, who seem most content, keep themselves open to simple moments of beauty and truth. These people are busy and focused and ambitious, many of them, but they also keep an antenna up for these moments, and give themselves permission to pause and experience.

How are your antennae?

Are they up and sensitive, ready to point you toward the sublime?

Or have they atrophied a little?

If they have, here is my challenge for you over the next week. Allow yourself to witness something Beautiful. Just one thing.

I can’t tell you what it will be, because it 1) could be nearly anything, and 2) it will be different for everyone. What is Beautiful to me won’t necessarily be Beautiful to you, and vice versa.

Here’s what I can tell you.

It may catch you totally by surprise. Just giving yourself permission to witness it may be enough.

But if you find yourself nearing the end of the week and you’re frustrated because nothing Beautiful has jumped out and grabbed you by the heart, there’s also this Truth.

Sometimes ordinary things, if we give them a little attention, if we let ourselves experience them in detail…sometimes ordinary things become beautiful when we stop taking them for granted or assuming they’re worthless.

4 a.m. birdsong.

A faded blanket.

Your partner’s toothbrush next to yours.

A drop of bright mustard spilled on a dark wood floor.

A piece of music you’ve never heard in quite that way.

If Beauty doesn’t snag us, we can still draw it to ourselves, if we’re quiet and patient and open.

So.

One thing, over the course of a whole week.

You won’t regret it.

(And here’s a picture of Fern, just because she’s cute.)