Beautiful Things Are Happening, Too

I hope you’re well. When I started writing this it was around 6am and the sun wasn't quite up yet. It's one of those October skies where it’s hard to say if the sun will come out today at all. Like one giant cloud (see above).

As we make our way toward Halloween, things tend to feel more and more foreboding and spooky, like this sky. The days are getting shorter and darker. It’s a mood ~ even in Southern California. I was thinking today about how there are lots of people who love spooky things ~ horror movies, for example. In fact, my husband and best friend are really into them. Me? Not so much.

In my mind, the world serves up enough horrors on its own. I don’t need to go looking for more! What I need more is to be reminded that beautiful things are happening, too. Like last week, when the sunrise looked like this ~ with streaks of light and color that truly stopped me in my tracks as I walked past the window:

A sky like that is gone in minutes. And if you’re by yourself, it can seem like a private experience of something everyone knows about. It’s just that no one else is looking and seeing that sky from your specific vantage point. It feels so special ~ especially in the context of the real-life horrors of this era. Those things are happening, and this is happening, too.

Have you had private moments like this with nature? Timeless times when you feel a kind of affirmation that beauty is also true? Maybe a butterfly landed on your hand, or maybe you were there at the exact moment when a loosely rolled iris bud fell open ~ like it had been holding its breath and suddenly exhaled and became a flower. Or something else?

We can’t make the magic happen. It finds us when we are available for it. Here’s a poem that speaks to this:

A Leaf
by Bronisław Maj

A leaf, one of the last, parts from a maple branch:
it is spinning in the transparent air of October, falls
on a heap of others, stops, fades. No one
admired its entrancing struggle with the wind,
followed its flight, no one will distinguish it now
as it lies among other leaves, no one saw
what I did. I am
the only one.

from A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry (Harcourt, 1996)

🍂

First, how amazing is it that the poet noticed the leaf and recognized what happened? With all that’s going on in the world and in our individual lives, it can be hard to slow down long enough to notice something so small. It takes an active decision to be here, in our senses, instead of lost in our thoughts. It might seem like a contradiction, but these sorts of moments are both rare and happening all the time. It’s just that we aren’t always looking.

And then I’m so grateful that Bronisław Maj also decided to create this poem. He took an experience and an insight, and transformed them into something that he could keep. I like to think that he mostly did it for himself so he wouldn’t lose it. And because he wrote this poem, he’s not the only one who knows about that one leaf ~ you and I know about it, too.

As I sat with this poem, I thought about how art journaling also helps us notice and create. When we write and draw and paint, we show up and look at ourselves and what’s here, rather than being preoccupied by our stories and assumptions. We choose to meet ourselves with curiosity, rather than re-telling those spooky horror stories our inner critic loves.

I hope you catch a glimpse of your own “leaf” this week ~ some small, beautiful thing that only you happen to see 🍁