Feed Your Need for Beauty

Hi there.

There are two words I notice myself saying a lot, perhaps more than any others: hard and beautiful. Whether reflecting in my journals or speaking with friends, these always come up as apt descriptors of what we’ve been experiencing.

Yes, there are difficulties — personal, political, and economic hardships that get us worked up and strain our ability to sit with the uncertainty of how they’ll develop — but boy if there aren’t blessings in spades as well — the birds singing out our windows, wind dropping leaves from trees with perfect timing during a pause in the conversation, or all the other little everyday miracles that let a faithful mind feel it’s taken care of.

Sometimes, in those instants of joy and appreciation, we can even recognize that the beauty couldn’t mean as much without our need to be replenished from our hardships. Because everything is relative, and we couldn’t appreciate the light without knowing the dark.

For me, there’s no time of day more illustrative of this paradox than the morning.

Now, I may be more a morning lark than a night owl, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy waking up each morning. Have you tried sleeping? It’s amazing (so amazing I even published a short story about how much it would suck to go without it)! Though I still wake up sluggish and find it hard to motivate myself to get out of bed, I also know from experience how much more fulfillment I’ll feel throughout the day if I create this space to rise early and greet the day. When I have the most difficulty even moving is also when I experience the most beauty, as the sun and everything under it begin to rise and sing with me. Go figure.

This week’s poem was created by, for, and about this experience of waking up at sunrise to receive a bit of the beauty that sustains me throughout the day. It also evolved into a warning about the ill effects of attempting to possess rather than merely admire the beauty around us.

I hope it helps give you fresh eyes to let in the beauty of the world around you, not as a distraction but a consummation for whatever difficulties in life you may be going through. Because as well as our stomachs, we need to feed our faith. Faith in what hardly matters, but the sun is as good an outlet for this energy as any. It is our energy’s source too, after all.

Feed Your Need for Beauty

There are 7 sunrises a week

and four ways of seeing each.

Let the mortal orange glow enter

the black hole horizons in your heavy head

and feed an organ of faith un-x-rayed

in need of beauty to burn as fuel,

a reason to believe that can't be argued with.

If you reach out to touch, taste, or bottle the rays,

and seal the songbirds in a gilded cage,

it would be to please the fear in your brain

but cauterize the leak beating through your soul.

You'd gain a pet to pull on its leash and watch die

but lose sight of dancing bodies in the sky

who’ll spread word you want to possess what they provide.

No wonder a glaze grows over your eyes

with all the riches stripped from their source

to decorate your self-important outsides.

But if you let the light enter without grasping,

you become what you admire, circulating through

this hormonal form, birthed through the pain

of distant flames burning to count the ways

dreams become real.

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