so full of light, this girl
walking through the airport
that watching her I see how one person
makes everything around them brighter,
even, when I am with her, me.
Posts Tagged ‘beauty’
One Probably Biased
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, biased, connection, daughter, mother on September 8, 2026| 3 Comments »
Among Strangers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged airport, beauty, rainbow, strangers, travel on July 25, 2026| 8 Comments »
I sat for hours in concourse A,
the plane delayed, delayed again,
surrounded by a young mother
with three hungry children and two
elderly couples who played endless
rounds of go fish and men in dark suits
on their cell phones and girls filming
dances for TikTok, when I looked up
and saw out the window a double rainbow,
ridiculously pretty against the slate sky,
and not wanting to be alone in my joy,
I touched the arm of the boy beside me
and he leaped up and ran to the window,
and all of us stopped to point or smile
or make jokes about pots of gold.
We will never see each other again,
but for a moment, we stood together
at the edge of delight, and the rainbows,
they just kept getting brighter, and I thought
it couldn’t possibly get any more lovely.
And the boy smiled at me. And then it did.
Entranced
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, life, spider on July 15, 2026| 2 Comments »
It scared me and thrilled me, the quick spider,
a gentle light gray, like midnight midsummer
in Finland. It was unusually large
for this part of the world where spiders
tend to be smaller than a dime. But this
spider had long, elegant legs,
I carefully gathered it in tissue.
You belong out here, I said, as I walked it to the lawn.
Slow as you please, it let out a length of dragline silk
to dangle from my hand like a pendulum.
Two nights ago, I held in my arms a newborn girl,
eyelashes barely visible, little bubbles forming
between slightly parted lips, her eyes moving
in sleep. What could be in the dreams of a three-
day-old child? I cradled her head in one hand,
her whole body in the other, astonished by how
much preciousness fits in a being so small.
All around us, so many kinds of beautiful lives.
And inside us, so many invisible strands of astonishing
elasticity and tensile strength that weave us together
through the chaos, beauty to beauty to bittersweet beauty
to innocent beauty to unlikely beauty to beauty.
What the Heart Knows
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, car, control, grief, safety on May 11, 2026| 51 Comments »
In every moment, there is a car
and an infinite hill and the chance
you will roll down that hill. With no brakes.
Backwards. When grief first yanked me
into its old beater, I was too stunned
to try to stop gravity from doing what
gravity does. Mostly, these days,
I forget what can happen. Mostly,
there’s a rope attached to the car
that keeps it from careening, a rope
made of friendship, of family,
of trust in the self that has grown over time.
The rope is a lovely illusion.
Sometimes I fool myself into believing
that the stability I feel is because
the brakes are fixed and I’ve become
better at parking, even in the steepest zones.
I fool myself into thinking the rope can’t be cut.
That is why, perhaps, it’s so surprising
when I feel the lurch, my stomach rising
into my chest. So surprising to see loss
is sitting in the driver’s seat looking
at me with its uncompromising gaze
as if to say, No, sweetheart,
that seatbelt won’t do you any good.
If you pray, now’s a good time for that—
but don’t bother to pray for the car
to stop. Pray to be able to laugh
as we speed down the hill.
Pray that as the world blurs by,
while terror squeezes your throat
what is most alive in you also notices
how radiant the sunset, how briefly
it shines, that tender pink.
Head Down
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, irony, work on April 4, 2026| 2 Comments »
so focused
on writing
about beauty
I almost
didn’t notice
the round
green scent
of aliveness
flourishing wildly
all around me
Everywhere
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ache, beauty, tenderness on February 14, 2026| 4 Comments »
Tenderness pierces the heart
the way a bright stream of sunlight
pierces evening clouds,
the way the green stem of garlic
pierces cold spring soil.
It pierces the heart the way protests
for justice pierce silence.
If anyone asks, where does it hurt,
the truest answer is everywhere.
If anyone asks, where can I find
beauty enough to make me weep,
the answer is the same.
In Broad Daylight
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Alex Pretti, beauty, loving the world, paradox, rage on January 26, 2026| 7 Comments »
I take my rage to the river.
A heron flies into the wind.
I let myself be opened
by the great gray wings
and the great gray sky
and the great gray largeness of water,
not to rid myself of rage
but to become a clearer channel
to meet the chest-scouring,
scab-clawing, cell-screaming,
throat-burning fury of rage
and remind my heart I can
know all this rage, can be
feral with rage and still
keep on loving the world.
Looking Up at the Sky at Sunset
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, selfishness, sharing, sunset on January 17, 2026| 4 Comments »
So much radiance
above the horizon—
glowing pink, deeper pink—
I wanted to gather
it all and keep it,
hold it forever,
but where to
store something
that large? I
gathered all that beauty
in my heart,
my heart, a mockery
of a pocket. Of course
it spilled out. I put
the pink glow back
in the sky. It lit
the whole world.
At the End of the Year
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, dancing, erik satie, new year, paradox on January 1, 2026| 10 Comments »
Just after midnight
we stand beside the stove
holding each other,
your thumb slowly relearning
the portal of my spine.
Satie’s first Gymopédie
slips stepwise through the room,
the tune like starlight emerging
after a storm blew down all the trees.
We are almost, but not quite, still.
How little movement it takes,
plus an opening in the mind,
to know the body as dancing.
How little beauty it takes
to know a sad moment
as a moment both sad and beautiful.
And what of a year? What of a life?
How much beauty can we bring
with the days we are given?
How would the years change
if we believed we were not
just moving through them,
but dancing?
At Her Last Dance Recital
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ballet, beauty, daughter on December 14, 2025| 4 Comments »
It was not all for this one moment
when she stood alone on stage,
poised on her toe shoes, both arms
raised, her hands and wrists pulsing
in delicate waves—all the pink tights
and hair nets, blisters and tears
and long rehearsals for fourteen years—
it was not all for this winged moment
when Saint-Saëns played and she leapt
and pirouetted and pas de bouréed—
but this was the moment when I knew
with certainty that in a world of ache
and cruelty, we can change the world
and be changed by beauty.
Ginkgo in Downtown New York
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, endurance, gingko, tree on November 24, 2025| 10 Comments »
They live a thousand years.
This, alone, is enough to
invite admiration. Robust.
Unfussy. They survive drought,
disease, pollution, pests.
They thrive in the midst of sirens
and car fumes, gridlocks and
garbage cans, concrete and horns.
And all across the city today,
a golden fluttering, a radiant trembling
on even the darkest streets. As if
to endure is not enough. As if we are
also here to burn bright, to shine, to offer
to the world every scrap of beauty we can.
The Change
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, beauty, change, death, flowers, frost, garden on October 5, 2025| 14 Comments »
Overnight, the frost
took every pink zinnia
every creamy dahlia,
fading their colors to brown.
The nasturtiums have slumped
into dense wilted tangle.
The marigolds hold themselves tall
in a blackened and upright
surrender. For now,
the bright, fresh bouquets
I made yesterday are still
bright and fresh in their vases.
This beauty, we know, won’t stay.
The message is simple:
All that rises passes away.
I see it in these hands
that planted and watered
and weeded and picked—
my skin now wrinkled and thin
as frost-withered petals.
Here: the chance to witness
my own rising and passing.
How natural to age, to die.
The flowers in the vase will wilt.
With every day, so do I.
Such strange gift. First
the joy of putting the self
in service to making something
beautiful. Then, beyond joy,
the grace in learning to let it all go.
A Scrap in Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, dahlia, flower, garden, time on September 6, 2025| 5 Comments »
Something about the relentless beauty
of the dahlias this year makes me forget
lists and calls and news and aches as
I stand beside them in a splendor stupor,
watching them bloom in real time, not
wanting to miss a moment of the long stems
rising, the red color deepening then fading
from the petals as they age. I imagine a time lapse
begins, and the world’s winter white, then greening
again, and now a hundred years pass,
now five hundred, a thousand, and the garden
bed is gone and the fence is gone and
the trees and the ditch and the home
are gone, and there’s no way to know
this was once a place where dahlias grew.
Is it any wonder, then, I call to you, ask you
to come stand here with me to watch
the dahlias open themselves to the sun,
each petal a hymn to the present,
a history soon to be forgotten, a shimmer in time
we might put in a vase and marvel as
all around it the whole world spins.
One Glorious
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, contentment, sunset on July 7, 2025| 1 Comment »
no use sipping this sunset—
I guzzle and immediately
I’m tipsy on pink
All at Once
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, fear, night, paradox, worry on June 18, 2025| 8 Comments »
Walking alone into the dark,
my fear comes with me.
I feel it small and hard
in my belly like a tiny grenade
the mind has conjured
in case I need protection.
Meanwhile, all around me
the night is peaceful.
The dark spills its generous ink
into every open space.
Crickets rub their legs in bright music.
The misty rain makes no sound.
But the mind is not convinced
the night is safe. It clenches tighter
around its fear. It does no good
to tell the mind not to worry.
Hello, tiny grenade.
I carry it with me as I walk
through a field of fireflies—
and I’m laid bare by the beauty
I find there—thousands of glittering sparks.
Isn’t it a marvel how a person
can be both clenching and opening
at the very same time
while moving alone through the dark?
Letter to Myself at Twenty-One
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, beauty, body on June 5, 2025| 18 Comments »
What is it that shines through all this withering?
—Kim Rosen, “Grand Finale”
You would be embarrassed of my body.
You would never believe contentment
is possible with a belly this soft
and legs this thick, but sweetheart,
I promise you I love being alive
in this time-ripened body that still
carries me into the garden to plant
snap peas, this body that cradles
my grown girls, that explores
the familiar terrain of my husband,
that walks through spruce forests and thrills
at the scent of evergreen and rain.
It is so much easier now to be gentle
with myself, even easy to be gentle with you.
Easy to forgive you for thinking you needed
to starve these bones. The irony is
you never felt beautiful, did you, and now,
when I am so far from your ideal,
I’ve never felt more lovely—
which is to say there is something
inside, a radiance, that beacons through
the crumbling walls of the body,
and the real beauty is being in service
to that shine, becoming less and less
a vessel and more and more that light.
How Do I Ever Forget It?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, evening, light, sun on May 25, 2025| Leave a Comment »
That moment that opens
when the evening light
makes the whole field glow
so everything is luminous,
every blade, every leaf, every stone,
even the weeds, even the carcasses,
even the ones who are watching—
not to forget we can also be cruel,
can kill, can lie, can betray,
but oh, we can also be as receptive
as a field in the golden hour,
letting light pour through us until
we, too, are that radiant, that generous,
that willing to be in service to beauty.