Beauty is Everywhere.

There is beauty everywhere. Maybe that's unwarranted optimism. Or maybe it's truth. No matter which, it's how a writer needs to see. Perhaps beauty brings the wrong image to mind. I don't mean beauty like a sunset or dress is beautiful. I mean beauty in that it has meaning, it fits, it is supposed to be. When you see something that fits these criteria, and you know it immediately and in your heart, this thing is beautiful. There are other ways to be beautiful, too. Hope in sorrow is beautiful. Never giving up against all odds is beautiful. The American Dream, that anyone can do or be anything if they work hard enough, is beautiful. Seeing things as they could be is beautiful. Choosing joy is beautiful. Love is the most beautiful thing there is.

Take a walk in nature. It doesn't have to be "real" nature: your backyard will do. Anywhere with plants. In our front yard, we have a grove of live oaks and cedars. Perhaps grove is a generous term. It doesn't look very beautiful in the eyes of most people: several of the trees are dead, dry-rotting and of a consistency somewhere between cardboard and rubber. A couple days ago, my family tried to "clean up" this area, with a chainsaw and a wheelbarrow, picking up the dead sticks off the ground and cutting down the cedars. Every time I picked up a large dead branch that had probably been there longer than our house, the underside teemed with roly-polies and spiders, mold and other fungi. Life burgeoned from rot. It was absolutely beautiful. Every time a cedar fell, I felt a pang: what had been alive and therefore beautiful a second ago now lay on the ground, still green, but severed from the live-giving roots. I wanted to glue it back together.

Find beauty everywhere. There is death and life everywhere, triumph and failure everywhere, and always a phoenix rising from the ashes. What is the ugliest thing in your yard? Look closer. Find the beauty. What is something you are struggling with? Look closer. Find the fire and life. Write a poem.

Lastly, remember the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, the old one with Linus reciting scripture, not the new one. Charlie Brown walks past so many tall, colorful, shimmering Christmas trees, straight to the scrawniest, ugliest, sickliest tree in the lot. Be Charlie Brown. See the glorious Christmas tree.