A Stubborn Flower
On beauty, and difficulty, and the world that holds both
I haven’t written in a while, and perhaps you noticed the silence. The reasons don’t lend themselves to easy summary: health concerns I’m trying to sort through, financial pressures that have a way of making everything else feel conditional, watching my kids navigate growing up in ways that tighten something in a parent’s chest, and, underneath all of it, the relentless ambient weight of a country that seems to be testing the tensile strength of everything we thought held it together. None of that is unique to my life, of course; most of you are carrying your own versions. Still, they have a cumulative effect, and somewhere in that accumulation, the writing stopped coming.
But this morning I walked outside to get in my car, headed to McDonald’s for a frappe (a small and unheroic errand) and found a cardinal sitting on my porch step. He looked at me for a moment, chirped two or three times with mild authority, and flew off. I got in the car. My playlist started. Complicated by Kimya Dawson. Flying Away from Home by Jon Muq. Lucky by Kat Edmonson. And then, before I even realized what was happening, something cracked and my sense of the world’s goodness began, once again, to break through.
That's the only way I can think to describe it. Beauty simply pushed all the weight aside, the way a flower comes up through concrete, insistent and indifferent to everything that should have stopped it.
For a long time I’ve been sitting with the gap between the world as it is and the world as we were told it would be; contemplating it in the particular, daily way of someone who believed certain promises about how things work, and who has lived long enough to watch those promises come up against reality and, more often than not, blink first.
But here’s what I keep returning to: the beauty was there yesterday, too. It’s there on the hard days, and the grinding days, and the days when I didn’t go outside or notice anything special at all. The cardinal didn’t appear this morning because something had changed; he was on that step, or somewhere nearby, the whole time.
And so was everything else.
The world has never been one thing. It has always been the redbird and the diagnosis, the song that catches you off guard and the bill you can’t pay, the child who makes you proud and the same child who keeps you up at night. Neither side of that is going anywhere. There is no version of a well-lived life in which the hard things are finally resolved and only the good remains; that’s not a destination, it’s a fantasy, and a fairly expensive one in terms of what it costs you while you’re waiting for it. The beauty isn’t hidden behind the difficulty, waiting to emerge once conditions improve. It’s just there, the same way the difficulty is just there, simultaneous and indifferent to each other, and the only real question, the one I keep failing to answer well, is which one I’m actually looking at on any given morning.
That’s not a small question. And most of us, if we’re honest, have trained ourselves to choose badly. We hold the cardinal at arm’s length because the grief is still there too, insisting that the small graces don’t count until the large ones arrive, refusing the gift because it showed up in the wrong packaging. But the beauty and the difficulty aren’t in competition with each other. They’re the same world seen from different angles, and neither one cancels the other out, which means neither one has to.
Some mornings the weight is genuinely all there is to see, and I don’t think the answer to that is to try harder or look more carefully. But some mornings the world conspires, quietly, in your favor, and the beauty doesn’t ask for your permission or your readiness; it just reveals itself, the way it always could have, because it was always there.
None of this is an argument for resignation. Some things need to be fought, resisted, or changed, and I’ll keep writing about those. The anxiety about my children is love doing exactly what love does when it can’t control the outcome, and the anger I feel about this country is not something I can pretend away.
But there is a difference between the fight and the fixation, and I’ve been closer to the latter than I care to admit. The fixation is the belief that because everything is not right, nothing can be fully received; that beauty is suspect until suffering is resolved, and gratitude is premature until the equation balances. That’s a kind of grief that has made itself into a worldview, and the world keeps offering evidence against it, if only we’re willing to look.
The world is beautiful. It is also hard and frightening and full of things that break your heart and strain your faith and make you wonder, on certain nights, whether any of it is going to be okay. It holds all of those things at once, without apology, and our job is to stay alert enough to catch the good when it comes, and to let it matter. It’s not proof that everything is fine. It’s just proof that everything is real.
I've been somewhere else for a while, but I'm trying to come back. This morning the beauty didn't wait for me to be ready; it just showed up on my porch step, chirped twice, and flew away, leaving me standing in the driveway with a longing for a frappe and something that felt, for the first time in a long time, like enough.