Hello, Beauty-full

We are all rebels when we see the beauty in ourselves and others.

This girl has got a draft …

Where I grew up, just a few miles from “the city line,” the accent is strong and pungent like blue cheese. My mother, who grew up in the Northeast section of Philadelphia, was our shepherdess in the Philly phonetics department: If something catches her eye — a painting, a vase of zinnias, a new pair of shoes — she’d deem it “byou-tee-full.”

However you say it — and I do recommend that you give my mother’s version a whirl just once — beauty is harder to come by these days.

I mean, beauty is all around us — when the snow falls and the icicles glimmer in the sub-freezing sun, and when my friend and his partner kiss goodbye not once, not twice, not three times but five times on the lips for me to see their love on our video call. And what is beauty if not light and love and joy and creativity and pleasure.

Beauty is all around us and yet it is practically invisible because Hideous and Vile have us surrounded. Hideous and Vile want to render us blind. They want to block out all the light; they want us to live in permanent darkness until we forget the whole point of being alive which is love and joy and creativity and pleasure.

Some say that art is the best form of resistance. As someone who strings words together for a living and takes a stab at this thing called art, I agree. But it’s just one of the many tools that we have at our disposal. Whether you make art or not, the thing we all have the power to do is to acknowledge Beauty. Because when we do, we create a domino effect.

Even a “Hello Beautiful” in the subject line of an email as my pal ET did earlier this week. Stop what you’re doing to watch the sunset as my friend Ann C does every night. Congratulate Susan E for news of her honorary doctorate and remind her next time that she looks stunning in orange. Tell Erin how proud I am of her for manifesting ideas into stellar motion.

And share good news. SHARE GOOD NEWS! Spread the news, the good news, let’s all get high from each other’s good news.

I have some good news: I have finished my memoir. Three years and seventy-five thousand words later, I have a draft, and that draft is now with my agent. Who knows what happens from here. But it’s a beautiful thing to finish a thing, to tell my story, to be on the other side of the story.

It’s a beautiful thing when my news inspires three friends at different stages of their drafts, to keep going. It’s a beautiful thing when we talk about our stories and those friends tell their friends and look what we just did. We made things even more beauty-full. In spite of our pain. In spite of our anguish. In spite of Hideous and Vile.

There are many days when no matter how hard I try I cannot see Beauty. She is so far away. Eclipsed by H & V. Which is when I will turn to you. For now, I’m keeping the front porch light on. Share your news. Let us know how beautiful you are.

And so it is.

xokod