Finding Beauty: A Theme and a Challenge for 2014
As some of you know, every year I choose a theme in January to help me keep on track (sane) the coming year. You may notice today is January 6 and that I haven't posted on this blog in a very long time. My theme should probably be something along the lines of Slow down. Be less busy. Take time to reflect here.
But..
I don't actually know if that's the reason I haven't posted yet. I think the reason I haven't posted yet is that I have been happily (or at least determinedly) living my life--a theme I still hold dear to my heart which I chose for 2013. (You can read that entry here: http://jbknowles.livejournal.com/468705.html)
Confession: As I just wrote that, I literally had to ask myself: Wait. Is it 2014 now? Or is it 2013? I really don't know what year it is? How is this possible??? And then, dear reader, I actually just clicked on my calendar to be sure. I don't know what this says about my frazzled brain. It has been a very busy year I guess. I've been doing a lot of living.
The deeper truth though, is I have been waiting for true, fresh inspiration. And that hasn't happened.
I have been patiently waiting for a theme that can inspire me and carry me through a year of living a better life for myself, for others, and our ever-increasingly fragile planet. How do I put that into a short and meaningful phrase? Nothing felt quite right.
Two nights ago, at the SNHU graduation, I was sitting among the faculty in the front row, feeling kind of out of place and proud at the same time. Dressed in my robe, holding a speech for my student in my hand, sandwiched between two remarkable writers, I kept thinking, How can I be here? Should I be here? Do I really belong among all of these incredibly smart and talented people? And then I told myself, well, you ARE. So enjoy it. Someone thinks you belong here, why can't you? Live your life! Remember?
Then Mark Sundeen, the author of The Man Who Quit Money and other brilliant things (http://marksundeen.com/) took the stage. Mark is a brilliantly funny and poignant writer. When you talk to him, the beauty and kindness of his soul dances out of every pore. He grins in a wicked way, and yet it's a kind wickedness, if you know what I mean. Mark is the kind of person who looks back at you, not through.
Mark's commencement speech began with a lot of humor about how little money we all make doing this thing we love, but in the end, he delivered 4 pieces of advice. It all resonated strongly, but it was the last that truly spoke to my heart.
With Mark's permission, I share a bit of it here:
Live a beautiful life, and design it with your full heart.
Of equal importance to my dream of being a writer is my dream of living a life of intention and autonomy... Ultimately, I am a writer because I'm in search of the truth, of some sort of enlightenment, and I realized early in life that for me, there was no truth to be found sitting in a cubicle juggling numbers or entering data or selling useless products to gullible people, where I felt my efforts were creating the exact same crummy world I wanted to condemn and transcend through my writing. I couldn't do that because then everything I wrote about truth and nobility and the wonder of the human spirit would be a fraud. So for me living simply isn't just about slumming it, it's about living nobly, about the self-determination allowing myself to spend my life pursuing what I love—maybe one day this is writing for 6 hours, another day it's skiing in the middle of the afternoon, another day it's reading manuscripts from students, another it's harvesting vegetables and cooking them. To me that is freedom. I want my life to be a thing of beauty. And I encourage you to invest the same vision, intention, craft, imagination, poetry, and form that you put into your book—put it into the living of your life every day.
While his entire speech was inspiring, the big moment for me was this sentence:
I want my life to be a thing of beauty.
What a goal. What a dream. And yet… does it really have to be so hard? What is beauty? Where is beauty?
The gift is being able to answer the first question honestly and the second willfully and with brave determination, even in the darkest times.
Beauty is everywhere. It can be found in the harshest corners of a broken heart. There is beauty in life as well as death. In a love remembered. In a struggle survived. Searching for beauty in the ugly, in the seemingly hopeless, in sadness, that's what hope is. That's what living is. That's how you live a beautiful life.
Yesterday, I ventured out for a walk in the cold. I'm at the SNHU MFA Winter Residency in Northern New Hampshire and the temperature with the wind kicking up was bitter. But Mark's words were bouncing around in my chest and the hotel we're all staying in, while beautiful, felt as though it were shrinking around me and I needed the air and the sky, their beauty, no matter how biting they might be.
The first thing I came across as I stepped out was a somewhat tacky ice-sculpture of a train. It just seemed so out of place up here in the mountains. I would have preferred something more reflective of the quiet beautiful space we're in. But as I stepped closer, I saw that the train had windows. And the frames had this beautiful detail. And when I stepped even closer, I saw that through those windows was this view:
Beautiful.
Beauty in the ugly.
I moved on. I knew there was a farm nearby but wasn't quite sure where. The wind picked up and I heard some children yelling in delight. I followed the sound and discovered two children flying down a tiny hill on tubes. There was a man who works at the hotel giving them big pushes with a pole and it struck me as so funny that here at this fancy resort, even sledding you get some assistance. "You can't do this where you live in California!" he called to them. And they said, "In California, we don't own snow pants!" There was so much delight in their voices. So much joy. So much beauty. Even if the privilege of it all felt a tad phony to me. Their joy was real. And it was beautiful.
I followed the path and saw a sign for the farm. The road was snow-covered and still so new that it was that pure kind of walk where your footprints alone are the only signs of someone having stepped there before.
I came across a pair of donkeys who let me scratch their foreheads. They seemed contentedly bored. Bored and beautiful.
Next was the hotel's barn full of a nice sampling of sheep and goats and lamas and all the cute farmyard stage animals you'd expect to see, but it was more of a petting zoon than anything else and there was something so strange about being there by myself, no staff people around because what crazy resort person would be visiting the farm in such sub-zero weather? Well, I was. And it was the absence of anyone else that made that moment so absurdly beautiful. The animals just looked at me and then ignored me. I didn't have food. I was of no use. So they let me watch as they meandered around one another. Seemingly confused about what their purpose really was on a day like that.
Honestly their indifference to me made me laugh. And then I saw this other pair, set apart from the rest. Facing each other as if it say, I only have eyes for you.
And that was beautiful, too.
Next I decided to follow a trail freshly groomed for cross-country skiers. But again, no one was skiing on a day like that. So I had the path to myself. It was eerily quiet. But something told me to keep walking. So I did. And found this tree. And I wondered, what stories could it tell?
In the summer, this tree is in the center of a golf course. Perfectly mowed and groomed in it's artificial beauty. But now, winter, nature, had covered up all the falseness with an honest blanket of white. And that was beautiful all by itself.
Last night, I went to a faculty reading and each reading was painful and hard and told of grief and despair. But underneath that, almost as if it couldn't be helped, was hope. My heart was at once rung out and then filled up. The words were both ugly and beautiful. Crushing and uplifting. They were ultimately about survival. About figuring out how to keep living even in the darkest times. That these women, these mentors, shared their stories so wholly and raw and honestly, was beautiful too. (Thank you Katie Towler, Amy Irvine McHarg, Leslie Jamison--you are beautiful inside and out)
This is how I want to live my life. To see the beautiful and how it can trump the ugly almost every time. It's believing in that, it's the constant searching for it, that I want to remember to do every day.
Yes. I want to live a beautiful life and, as Mark puts it, design it with a full heart. This is how I want to share my life.
Keep finding the beauty. It's so easy most of the time. And even when it's hard, to know that it's possible makes all the difference.
I want to find beauty in all the people I know and meet. I want to find it in objects. I want to find it on the dirty streets. In seemingly impossible situations. In moments of frustration and doubt.
Can I do it? Maybe not always. But I think it's a goal worth aiming for. I challenge you to do the same.
~*~*~*~*~
Monday Morning Warm-Up:
Write about something beautiful.
But..
I don't actually know if that's the reason I haven't posted yet. I think the reason I haven't posted yet is that I have been happily (or at least determinedly) living my life--a theme I still hold dear to my heart which I chose for 2013. (You can read that entry here: http://jbknowles.livejournal.com/468705.html)
Confession: As I just wrote that, I literally had to ask myself: Wait. Is it 2014 now? Or is it 2013? I really don't know what year it is? How is this possible??? And then, dear reader, I actually just clicked on my calendar to be sure. I don't know what this says about my frazzled brain. It has been a very busy year I guess. I've been doing a lot of living.
The deeper truth though, is I have been waiting for true, fresh inspiration. And that hasn't happened.
I have been patiently waiting for a theme that can inspire me and carry me through a year of living a better life for myself, for others, and our ever-increasingly fragile planet. How do I put that into a short and meaningful phrase? Nothing felt quite right.
Two nights ago, at the SNHU graduation, I was sitting among the faculty in the front row, feeling kind of out of place and proud at the same time. Dressed in my robe, holding a speech for my student in my hand, sandwiched between two remarkable writers, I kept thinking, How can I be here? Should I be here? Do I really belong among all of these incredibly smart and talented people? And then I told myself, well, you ARE. So enjoy it. Someone thinks you belong here, why can't you? Live your life! Remember?
Then Mark Sundeen, the author of The Man Who Quit Money and other brilliant things (http://marksundeen.com/) took the stage. Mark is a brilliantly funny and poignant writer. When you talk to him, the beauty and kindness of his soul dances out of every pore. He grins in a wicked way, and yet it's a kind wickedness, if you know what I mean. Mark is the kind of person who looks back at you, not through.
Mark's commencement speech began with a lot of humor about how little money we all make doing this thing we love, but in the end, he delivered 4 pieces of advice. It all resonated strongly, but it was the last that truly spoke to my heart.
With Mark's permission, I share a bit of it here:
Live a beautiful life, and design it with your full heart.
Of equal importance to my dream of being a writer is my dream of living a life of intention and autonomy... Ultimately, I am a writer because I'm in search of the truth, of some sort of enlightenment, and I realized early in life that for me, there was no truth to be found sitting in a cubicle juggling numbers or entering data or selling useless products to gullible people, where I felt my efforts were creating the exact same crummy world I wanted to condemn and transcend through my writing. I couldn't do that because then everything I wrote about truth and nobility and the wonder of the human spirit would be a fraud. So for me living simply isn't just about slumming it, it's about living nobly, about the self-determination allowing myself to spend my life pursuing what I love—maybe one day this is writing for 6 hours, another day it's skiing in the middle of the afternoon, another day it's reading manuscripts from students, another it's harvesting vegetables and cooking them. To me that is freedom. I want my life to be a thing of beauty. And I encourage you to invest the same vision, intention, craft, imagination, poetry, and form that you put into your book—put it into the living of your life every day.
While his entire speech was inspiring, the big moment for me was this sentence:
I want my life to be a thing of beauty.
What a goal. What a dream. And yet… does it really have to be so hard? What is beauty? Where is beauty?
The gift is being able to answer the first question honestly and the second willfully and with brave determination, even in the darkest times.
Beauty is everywhere. It can be found in the harshest corners of a broken heart. There is beauty in life as well as death. In a love remembered. In a struggle survived. Searching for beauty in the ugly, in the seemingly hopeless, in sadness, that's what hope is. That's what living is. That's how you live a beautiful life.
Yesterday, I ventured out for a walk in the cold. I'm at the SNHU MFA Winter Residency in Northern New Hampshire and the temperature with the wind kicking up was bitter. But Mark's words were bouncing around in my chest and the hotel we're all staying in, while beautiful, felt as though it were shrinking around me and I needed the air and the sky, their beauty, no matter how biting they might be.
The first thing I came across as I stepped out was a somewhat tacky ice-sculpture of a train. It just seemed so out of place up here in the mountains. I would have preferred something more reflective of the quiet beautiful space we're in. But as I stepped closer, I saw that the train had windows. And the frames had this beautiful detail. And when I stepped even closer, I saw that through those windows was this view:
Beautiful.
Beauty in the ugly.
I moved on. I knew there was a farm nearby but wasn't quite sure where. The wind picked up and I heard some children yelling in delight. I followed the sound and discovered two children flying down a tiny hill on tubes. There was a man who works at the hotel giving them big pushes with a pole and it struck me as so funny that here at this fancy resort, even sledding you get some assistance. "You can't do this where you live in California!" he called to them. And they said, "In California, we don't own snow pants!" There was so much delight in their voices. So much joy. So much beauty. Even if the privilege of it all felt a tad phony to me. Their joy was real. And it was beautiful.
I followed the path and saw a sign for the farm. The road was snow-covered and still so new that it was that pure kind of walk where your footprints alone are the only signs of someone having stepped there before.
I came across a pair of donkeys who let me scratch their foreheads. They seemed contentedly bored. Bored and beautiful.
Next was the hotel's barn full of a nice sampling of sheep and goats and lamas and all the cute farmyard stage animals you'd expect to see, but it was more of a petting zoon than anything else and there was something so strange about being there by myself, no staff people around because what crazy resort person would be visiting the farm in such sub-zero weather? Well, I was. And it was the absence of anyone else that made that moment so absurdly beautiful. The animals just looked at me and then ignored me. I didn't have food. I was of no use. So they let me watch as they meandered around one another. Seemingly confused about what their purpose really was on a day like that.
Honestly their indifference to me made me laugh. And then I saw this other pair, set apart from the rest. Facing each other as if it say, I only have eyes for you.
And that was beautiful, too.
Next I decided to follow a trail freshly groomed for cross-country skiers. But again, no one was skiing on a day like that. So I had the path to myself. It was eerily quiet. But something told me to keep walking. So I did. And found this tree. And I wondered, what stories could it tell?
In the summer, this tree is in the center of a golf course. Perfectly mowed and groomed in it's artificial beauty. But now, winter, nature, had covered up all the falseness with an honest blanket of white. And that was beautiful all by itself.
Last night, I went to a faculty reading and each reading was painful and hard and told of grief and despair. But underneath that, almost as if it couldn't be helped, was hope. My heart was at once rung out and then filled up. The words were both ugly and beautiful. Crushing and uplifting. They were ultimately about survival. About figuring out how to keep living even in the darkest times. That these women, these mentors, shared their stories so wholly and raw and honestly, was beautiful too. (Thank you Katie Towler, Amy Irvine McHarg, Leslie Jamison--you are beautiful inside and out)
This is how I want to live my life. To see the beautiful and how it can trump the ugly almost every time. It's believing in that, it's the constant searching for it, that I want to remember to do every day.
Yes. I want to live a beautiful life and, as Mark puts it, design it with a full heart. This is how I want to share my life.
Keep finding the beauty. It's so easy most of the time. And even when it's hard, to know that it's possible makes all the difference.
I want to find beauty in all the people I know and meet. I want to find it in objects. I want to find it on the dirty streets. In seemingly impossible situations. In moments of frustration and doubt.
Can I do it? Maybe not always. But I think it's a goal worth aiming for. I challenge you to do the same.
~*~*~*~*~
Monday Morning Warm-Up:
Write about something beautiful.
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