Are You a Beauty Hound Too?: Everyday Magic, Day 1,039

As a kid in love with the beauty of horses (and cats and dogs and.....)

I can't remember ever not being a beauty hound. My earliest memory, sitting on what was to my three-year-old self a giant cliff, fishing with my grandfather was a beauty immersion. I was in love with moving water, light breeze, my slim, very quiet grandfather chain-smoking Tareyton cigarettes in one hand, balancing his fishing pole in the other. It was a moment of great peace, calm, love, and belonging. In short, it was beautiful.

So much of what I write or draw or look for on walks -- lately wandering up cracked sidewalks along Spring Street in Eureka Springs, Arkansas -- aims my senses toward beauty. The beauty of a Victorian lamp post glowing just past dusk, dozens of layers of leaves tilting light into or away from them, the repetitive wind-up song of the Carolina wren, a paused squirrel on the porch just now, holding still in her most earnest face, then zipping off on a mission. The beauty of a young couple sitting on a stoop, singing the Grateful Dead's "Ripple" while bubbles pour past them from a nearby art store.

The sky: an endless parade of beauty

While I turn and return to the living earth -- get thee outside as soon as possible each summer morning when the air is actually lovely instead of stifling -- I stand in infinite beauty. Yes, I'm aware of the headlines today and yesterday, the hurricanes of damage, destruction, and deep suffering. I go through bouts of anguish over climate change, species extinction and so much more harming this beautiful land and sky. But I find my fortitude, insight, clarity, and connection to the holy in the beauty that rides side-car to the falling apart of the world.

This necessitates opening my eyes and mind to what beauty is and could be, which is not what many of us were told, very much like whatever we know of real love is not what fairy tales and high school dramas told us to expect. Beauty is a Wabi Sabi thing: what's being born, what's falling apart, what's finding its wings, what's holding, what alone, what's flowing into more than itself. As John Keats wrote in "Ode to a Grecian Urn,"

         "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

I hear this as beauty intrinsic to the life force, what Dylan Thomas calls "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," which he writes also drives our own "green age" moving us deeper into life (and, as Thomas also says, closer to death).

But then again, what would I be seeking on the cusp of no longer being able to seek? Beauty, I'm sure of it, just as I treasured the beauty of so many big life force moments: the startlingly beautiful faces of each of my children the first time I held them after birth. The vibrant, color-topia beauty of a bunch of vases full of flowers seven years ago on my kitchen counter after two difficult eye surgeries to to disable the cancer I had unbeautifully picked up. The beautiful thunder and sound of rain merged with the sound of trains passing over our heads when I was a child asleep in my grandparents' apartment in Brooklyn.

I've got a thing for peonies and most flowers

All this beauty a feast for the senses. All this beauty a call, sometimes literally through the birds or wind or a friend's hand on my shoulder or my very old and blind cat staring into my eyes regardless or my husband's voice on the phone when I accidentally wake him up.

All I can do to cozy up to beauty. Writing especially is a way for me to quiet my mind enough to focus in on the beauty that sustains me. Even writing this blog post from the porch at the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, I'm awed by the shaded slope high above the rock wall across the way, and the legs of maples extending up beyond my view.

Beauty is as available to us as our next breath. Close your eyes and listen for it. Open your eyes and give thanks. Sit still for a moment and feel the air. Be a beauty hound.

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I'm delighted to offer my first class focused all in on beauty: Writing Beauty, a 6-week online class starting Aug. 17. Come join me and write (poetry, memoir, whatever you like) your way into the beauty of what we can do with words.