Beauty will Save the World
I wrote this on Good Friday and I’m not sure why it didn’t get posted here, so here it is now. Not a whole lot has changed here in So Cal, the last 10 days except that it feels like we’ve skipped over spring and gone straight to summer.
Beauty
Spring
Community
Hope
Celebration
Those are the words I’d typically use to describe this time of year. Here in Southern California it’s been mostly cold and rainy the last 3 weeks. Between the rain and self quarantining it feels like spring has been cancelled. I told my mom the other day I was beginning to feel like I was in Narnia when it was always winter but never Christmas.
Dostoevsky said “beauty will save the world”.
This week IQAir said that Los Angeles has the cleanest air in the world. What?! How is that possible?? Mother Nature, God, Beauty, the universe, a power greater than yourself...whatever you want to call it is repairing itself from the damage humanity has done to Earth. We have not been good stewards. I’ve seen memes saying “doesn’t it feel like Mother Nature has sent us all to our rooms?” And I as used to say to my kids “you know better, now go think about what you’ve done and don’t come out until you’re ready to behave”.
This pandemic has highlighted social inequality. It’s also shined a light on people who are often marginalized. The person that works at the gas station, the checker at the grocery store, the truck driver, the people that work in the fields to pick the food we buy, the person at the fast food restaurant, the driver and the delivery person. They are all now considered “essential workers”, just like first responders, doctors and nurses. Guess what?! They were always essential! They are all what’s keeping everything going right now.
I keep seeing “we’re all in this together”, “you’re not alone” but sometimes it sure feels like it. This week is Passover, today is Good Friday and Ramadan starts in a couple of weeks, these are Holy, contemplative, reflective times. This morning I was reading along and read the word atonement. Then I saw this: “at-one-ment”. Which means to be at one with, my anxiety was replaced with a calm. This is where we are all supposed to be.
Going forward things need to be different. When we know different we can do different. We now know better. We’ve seen gratitude and respect shown to people we used to overlook. We’ve seeing people taking care of each other, we’ve been present with our loved ones. And we are all in this together because there is no difference, there is no space, we are at one we just didn’t realize it before. Even though it feels like winter, winter doesn’t last forever. Spring will come, we will emerge from our cocoons like this beautiful Monarch. There will be celebrations, hope is not lost, there will be beauty from ashes and like a Phoenix we will rise.
Happy Passover ✡️ Happy Easter ✝️ Aslan is on the move 🦁
