It’s now somehow February. Last week I found my neighbor attaching two by fours to a fencepost with a camera mounted on top. There are a pair of barn owls nesting in the box on the fence line.
For the past week I’ve been watching as a red tail hawk carefully gathers material for the nest they are building in the eucalyptus tree. I thought about them as the wind howled in the middle of the night, did the nest blow out of the tree?
And just across the same fence is the first of the flowering quince. A bright coral mark in all the green.
Here we are in this new year, an election year, the year where keep calling our reps in hope of slowing down the Israel’s decimation of Gaza, the year where we’ll live through heat and flood, where we’ll work too much or not enough but either way will spend much of it thinking about money.
And in this as I tend and keep tending to the tasks of what it is live I think a lot about how and what I devote myself to.
The clouds this morning were incredible, pink and orange, and as C says, “my favorite color purple.”
For as long as I can remember I was fascinated with beauty. If I understood astrology some might say this can be explained by how the stars lined up for my birth. I don’t understand astrology despite many patient explanations but what I do know is that I can’t shake the fascination with beauty. I feel how it matters. I feel it as a balancing force. I feel it as part of what it means to be and to hold wholeness.
I feel the overwhelming need to navigate this wholeness, this love of beauty, the making and the enjoying, as a point of dynamic return, as a birth right, as a North Star.
I don’t often write about it because when I start I can’t shake the cultural moment we are in that obsesses with certain kinds of action, thought, and response. A certain kind of pragmatism that feels strongly rooted in a desperate moment of need.
Nothing in me disagrees with that. It is true, we have great need. But I want to stretch that imagination hold more, to be full of possibility, many of them nothing more than that. I want beauty and its balancing force to be one of those possibilities that is practiced and known.
We were born with imaginations. We have them and they have us. What is it like to practice with them? To let them take up more space as we wash dishes, collect tax documents, work. What is it to hold that imagination and love of beauty dear? As an organizing force, as a way point.
Maybe you can tell me what that is for you?
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Taking a break from book club this month but we’ll be back in March!
Listening to the Cobain 50 and loving it!!!
Paying attention to change and how sticky it feels.
Reading all the chapbooks but especially Tangerine and Glint.