Archive for the ‘beautiful’ Category

Fixing Up

Posted: May 13, 2010 in beautiful
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“Let’s  fix up!”

“Why? So we can impress other people?”

“Nope! That’s not the motivation at all.  Come on, let’s get started.”

“I think I’ll pass.”

“Why?”

“Actually, I don’t care what the place looks like. It’s old. It is what it is. And I definitely don’t care anymore what I look like. Look at me. What’s the use. I’ll never look good.”

 “It sounds like you’ve given up.”

“No, I just don’t care about appearances. That’s not important to me anymore.”

“But it is important to you.”

“Why?”

“I think the disarray you are have fallen into is demotivating you and limiting you.”

“How?”

“Well, if you let the body you live in and the places you reside in fall into disrepair and messy neglect, then you are becoming very passive about being influential. You and your body are missing opportunities to inspire yourself and other people!”

“But you don’t get it. I don’t have anything to inspire others with.”

 “I respectfully  disagree. Any time a person, no matter their age or state, brings improvement to themselves or their surroundings, that’s inspiring!  Remodels, repairs, remakes, fixing up — these are highly encouraging to the people who do them and the people who see them.”

“I’m tired.”

“A vision for renewal would energize you!”

“I like a mess.”

“I think that the disorder outside of you is creating feelings of disorder and paralysis inside of you.”

“You’re a neat freak.”

“It’s not about neatness. A new flower garden doesn’t have to be planted in rows. A personal hair style doesn’t have to be hair in a bun. A painted wall doesn’t have to be all one color. A remodeled church doesn’t have to look sterile.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Listen — dirty and broken and neglected is not acceptable. It’s giving up. For God sake, look around you! This all shouts, fix me up. Bring me back. Give me new life. Repurpose me!”

“Are you done.”

“No, but you might be.”

Places

Posted: May 4, 2010 in beautiful
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Places carry symbolic content.  The content settles. The content changes.

The woods I grew up in the Midwest are a beautiful wild place in my mind — tan deer in  green fields in the late blue evenings, green striped bass hiding under soggy brown tree roots in silver streams we fished in, wild dark brown  morels popping up by decaying black logs in the light green spring, dry oak and elm leaves crunching as I walked through them in the winter, fire flies blinking off and on in the field in front of the house.

The  home in Southern California that my wife and I bought while my children were growing up is in my mind a, safe, clean, cozy, fireplaced refuge —  bedrooms where I pushed little shoes on my babies’ feet,  a tile-countered kitchen where we celebrated their birthday parties with cake and ice cream on bright paper plates, new sidewalks outside on which I walked them to grade school and back, holding their small, sweaty hands tightly. I now rent this home  to someone else. It is their home now. It has changed, but it will always be for me the place where my babies grew into young women.

The church I  attend is an artist’s palate, a old Spanish Revival building that our congregation has committed to repaint, to re-stucco, to redecorate, to re-cabinet, to re-beautify. It has had a tough history during some of its last 30 years,  but it has good DNA too. I was baptized there. I was married there. It is a place of beginnings  for me.  Now it is becoming a  place of giving for me, of doing for other people,  of opening the doors to a new set of people in my life.

The city I live in here in Southern California  used to be  for me a place to drive in, to walk in, to eat in, to shop in, to make friends in, to make a home it. But this has changed. I have lived here a long time. I have both thrived here and I have been broken here. My city has been a safe place; it has been an unsafe place.

 I have seen it change, and I have seen myself change.  I have lived here trying to suck sommething from the ground, trying to add something to myself from the beautiful, master-planned  neighborhood I live in.  That is changing.   I am beginning to want to give something back to my city. I am beginning to have odd feelings concerning my city and the people who live around me. I am beginning to  love the people in my city, and I am starting to take responsibility for them.

I feed them, cloth them, teach them, write for them and I try to  take them under my wing and comfort them. And I try each day to take the people of my city asside and  call beauty out of them.

I am outnumbered. I am small and weak. My limits are extremely obvious.

I am entirely undiscouraged by that.

I embrace today as another day to make a momumental difference here.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

We Need Beauty

Posted: March 30, 2010 in beautiful
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We need protein. We know that and so we go find it in the morning, at lunch time  and in the evening, sometimes making too many trips back to the refrigerator for what we know we need.

We need sleep. We know that at night, and sometimes in the afternoon and after we have performed for too long and given away too much of our stored energy.

We need safety. We know that when we drive and when we fly and sometimes when we read or watch the news.

We need love. We know that when we are alone too much, and when we lose someone treasured and valued and when we want to be hugged or held.

We need beauty. Too often we don’t know that.

We need the beauty of volume, of things cubic, of things with circumference. The other night I looked up. The moon was huge and far and white. I put it in my eye, and I washed a little bit of the difficult day out with it.

We need the beauty of distance. A few weeks ago I went out to the Anza Borrego desert east of San Diego. From highway 79 just south of the town of Julian I stopped at the desert outlook. I squeezed through the sun roof of my SUV and sat on top.  Thousands of feet below and miles away, the beautiful, sandy desert and beyond the blue Salton Sea. I soaked my psyche in the far off.

We need  the beauty of faces. I recently looked into the face of a woman with cancer and then into the face of her mother who  had just prayed for her, thanking God for giving her her little girl so long ago,  a very old woman praying for her aging daughter and all the beauty she was at the beginning and is now, perhaps near the end.  I looked in their faces as they looked in each other’s familiar faces and there was pure, love-drenched beauty.

We need the beauty of color. Last weekend my wife and I hiked the trail from the top of Torrey Pines, south of Del Mar, down to the beach. Stopping half way down, the color palate was stunning, yellow Sea Dahlias, red Paint Bush, blue heliotrope, purple and white Black Sage and the red sand cliffs and the aqua marine ocean. We needed this because we had worked too much in confined spaces, too close to sheet rock and paint for too long.

We desperately need beauty, the beauty of motion. Last weekend, when we reached the beach at Torrey Pines, there sliding through the waves, we watched pod after pod of dolphins swim south in the sea. They swam in lyrical, synchronized  movements, up and down with each other by threes and fours. Their arcing, slicing motion was  beauty,  healing and good.

A few days ago some friends and I got together with an artist; she spread out her water paints, and we went at it. In color and shape we expressed life, fresh life, changing life.  We broke free from amateur attempts at realism and painted our feelings of renovation, innovation and exhilaration. The results were astonishing — beautiful, inspiringly beautiful. Some of my friends had Down Syndrome. Their art? Simple and beautiful.

We need beauty, often, close, experienced,  savored.  We would do well to know that more and to make the conscious aesthetic choice to go find it, to know it, to treasure it, to soak in it, and to let it inside of us to fill us up again.

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