Love, perhaps

I started 2026 thinking about beauty.

By which I do not mean glamour, or things that are pretty, or anything artificial or just skimming the surface.

When my little family gathered to reflect and set and share intentions, initially, my daughter seemed disinclined. She stood and watched as we each settled on the floor around a candle, a haphazard gathering, perhaps, but still a gathering. Suddenly, she left the room. When she returned, she carried with her the anthology of Mary Oliver’s poems, a book that had traveled with her during the spring months, tucked under her arm as she headed to school or out to play.

I looked at her as she sat, her suddenly lanky frame bent over the pages, copying something in her own handwriting on paper I had torn from my journal. Her shoulders rounded, her face gathered in concentration, and everything about the moment was filled with fervent effort and attention. Something around my heart ached in response to the beauty in her earnest expression.

Later that evening, my son and daughter experienced enthusiastic agreement about something. As they looked at each other with the expression of two people who suddenly realized how deeply they understood one another - that they are, in fact, not alone - they could not help but reach out for each other, wrapping themselves together in a tight embrace. Beautiful.

One year ago, I walked through my days on high alert. I tried to prepare myself for what I knew would be an onslaught of cruelty. “Tender, stay tender,” a voice in my mind repeated, but I was jittery, a harshness tingeing the edges of my own experience.

One year later, this much is clear: I don’t have answers or a secret recipe for sanity in this time during which much is asked of anyone who seeks to live into a world defined by kindness, by respect for how deeply we are, all of us, interwoven. I have a lot of questions and perhaps that is just the way it should be.

However, I know this: I will not get where I am trying to go if my alertness is solely trained to the fight. Yes, I’m committed to showing up however I can to block injustice and cruelty and harm driven by greed and if I stay there only, then the injustice and cruelty and harm are all I can see.

As our family sat around the candle’s flickering light, I also bent over a book of poetry: Andrea Gibson’s You Better Be Lightning. Like my daughter, I copied words in my own handwriting onto a piece of paper.

“beauty is in the eye of anyone who sees

what’s missing but can’t stop pointing

to what’s still there.

If there’s no definition for love yet -

I think that’s a good one.”

I love this world. I love this life. This year, more than ever and more than anything, that much was abundantly clear, is abundantly clear. As I have looked into the eyes of others who are grieving, scared, and determined, I have felt that love. As I have watched my children continue to grow and learn in tremendous delight and wonder, I have felt that love. As I have seen people come together honestly and earnestly, to collectively hold questions and collaboratively insist on a different way, I have felt that love.

We see what’s missing: we see the cruelty, we see the harshness, and we don’t absolve ourselves of the responsibility we hold to say: “No, not this.”

But we don’t stop there. We point: over here. Look at what’s still here. Look at the children marveling at the world, finding joy in the bleakest of situations, finding each other. Look at life, everywhere, stretching towards each new day. Look, look, look: it is so darned beautiful.

And maybe, just maybe, that is love. Seeing the harshness, working to stop it, and still pointing our eyes, our hearts, our imaginations, our creativity towards building a way of being that honors all that is still so beautiful.

When I looked at my daughter’s paper after she finished writing, I found that she had copied down one of Oliver’s most famous poems: The Summer Day. Not the entire poem, but the parts that clearly called to her being. The questions at the beginning:

Who made the world?

Who made the swan and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopped?

And the beckoning at the end:

I don’t know what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

What is it we plan to do? Attention to the beauty, holding it up, pointing, reaching towards each other in a collective noticing, asking how we might honor it best, maybe this, here, is a good place to start.