Beauty Never Left Us

In which we are filled with wonder.

A few days ago my eight-year-old, who inherited her ecologist grandma’s eye for natural beauty and wonder, found a piece of quartz shaped like a round-cut diamond lying in the dirt beside a tree. She washed it carefully and brought it to me, cradled in her hand. “Why aren’t these as valuable as diamonds?” she asked, marveling at its beauty.

I answered as best I could: “Because diamonds are more rare…and shinier?”

She looked at me with that look of contemptuous confusion that children save for stupid grown-up answers, and walked off to add the precious stone to her rock collection.

I suppose I could have told her that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what the saying misses is how we allow others to ascribe value to the beauty in the world, and how we thus allow (often mercenary) intermediaries to dim our vision.

Because I am my mother’s daughter, and because I have three wide-eyed wondering children, I am lucky to live in a world of beauty and amazement. If I described my home to you – a suburban house in a nondescript neighborhood outside of Washington, DC – you’d maybe pity me, as no landscape within hundreds of miles is likely to ever find a place on any list of natural wonders of the world, and people only pay a premium to live here for its proximity to the city, and not for any striking feature of the land. But all of those metrics are irrelevant to me, because I see Beauty everywhere here, and am all the richer and luckier for it.

My hellebores, for example, which burst into bloom when winter’s grip is still strong all around, never fail to take my breath away each year, and each year I discover a new color I don’t remember ever seeing in their petals before. There’s a tiny strip of woods behind my house, and a little stream that fills the air with a rushing symphony after a rain, and sycamores whose patchy white trunks catch the winter light and fling it to and fro, and lovely blossoms falling from the tulip poplars in summer, and a family of red-tailed hawks who are not strangers, and barred owls who call “who cooks for you?” through the trees, and foxes icing the air with their human shrieking mating calls or wandering insouciant down the dawn-lit street. And in my yard there’s a wren pair each year that nests in the hollow gourd I’ve hung for them, and sparrows that raise their young in my birdhouse, and raucous, flashy blue jays, and Carolina wrens who call my oldest daughter’s name – “Veronique, Veronique, Veronique” - and shiny beetles in a range of hues, digging and gathering in the soil. And overhead, of course, the sunrises and sunsets are as beautiful as anywhere, and of course the moon, and Orion standing guard over my home, and Cassiopeia bound to her eternal chair, and often Mars, and Jupiter, and Saturn.

The rabbi who eulogized my mother said: “She possessed the rarest capacity of human beings, undaunted, unjaded, unjaundiced, unoxidized by cynicism, arrogance, or despair: the capacity to wonder…She had the capacity to experience, as Abraham Joshua Heschel called it, ‘radical amazement.’ She had tremendous awe of nature.  It gave her wonder.” And, he said, she “had the capacity to see a universe in a handful of soil.”

2020 was a miserable, tragic year. This is not in question. I suffered less than some, and maybe more than others. But Beauty never left. It was there for all of us this year - not just for the privileged, who have never been its sole keepers - and it is there still. This new year won’t be a panacea, and the world won’t magically heal itself when the old calendar is taken down from the wall, when the new calendar is hung. What we must do, if we are to find Beauty where it lives, is become again the beholders, as we were in childhood, as many were before us who lived closer and more in rhythm with the natural world around them. We must try to rid our minds of the labels and the price tags, and ask ourselves only “is this lovely?” when we find a wonder the false prophets of beauty would have us overlook.

This winter a pair of bald eagles has taken up residence in our local woods, and we’ve been on high alert for them. And so, yesterday, when two raptors suddenly appeared, swooping low over us, I took a video as they circled, and sent it to my naturalist sister for identification. The answer she sent back what was I had suspected: vultures – no doubt gathering over some tasty carcass in the woods. And in that moment I felt a surge of disappointment – all of our excitement was just for vultures, common birds in our region, and scavengers to boot? But that, of course, was all wrong. There was beauty in their flight, and they are no less mysterious and wild for being more common than the rare eagles who only sometimes appear, just as my hellebores are no less stunning for their abundance, and for the clockwork predictability of their blooms each year. There is beauty everywhere. In the new year, may we all strive to behold it.