A Moment's Notice: Beauty Abounds

We feel most alive in the presence of the beautiful, for it meets the needs of our soul. John O’Donohue, Beauty, the Invisible Embrace

To allow ourselves to be taken by the beauty of a thing allows goodness to take up space that’s often denied in our interior worlds. Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

The past ten years have been a time of spiritual growth and becoming for me. A time of learning to notice and name the things that feed my soul. As our world situation seemed ever more plunged into darkness, I felt myself noticing moments in daily life that became luminous with beauty. Like morning light streaming through a window in my living room, filling a vase I inherited from my mother with a fiery glow. My little dog tucking her head under my palm with such endearment, asking me to scratch behind her ears. Bringing my husband coffee in bed each morning, his gentle smile and quiet words of thanks. Watching a doe step gracefully out of the woods behind the house, our eyes meeting and I barely breathing as we connect in a long pause of utter stillness.

Within these fleeting moments, a feeling of calm and fulfillment washed over me, a feeling I can only call peace. Like a gentle holy breeze blowing across my face that relieves and refreshes at the same time.

I have learned to name these moments as Beauty. I believe they occur for all of us, all the time. I also believe these moments can heal us, enrich us, and call us into a wholeness of living that makes life on earth a little bit more like heaven.

So it seemed like a natural evolution to choose Beauty as a concept to explore during this year 2025. Because I write as a way to understand myself and my place in creation, it is also natural for me to write about it. I want to tell you that I’m writing a book about it, a book titled A Moment’s Notice, An Invitation to Pay Attention to Extraordinary Moment’s of Beauty in Your Ordinary Life.

In this online space I want to share what I notice about Beauty in my life during this writing process. I want to invite you into noticing those moments of Beauty in your life. I want us to make space for them, to find comfort and hope within them, to create them for ourselves and the good of the world.

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Why pay attention to moments of beauty in a world that’s so badly broken? Why should I care what’s beautiful around me when nations and forests are on fire?  When epidemics of addiction and loneliness abound? When truth is relative and intelligence is artificial? Even if we ourselves are fine in the present moment, we are confronted with disasters in our families, our communities, our wider world.

How much of it can a human heart hold before it collapses in despair?

But, what if, as author Sarah Clarkson writes in her book This Beautiful Truth, “God’s hand reaches out to us, clothed in Beauty, and by grasping it and trusting it, we may learn to walk through the darkness in hope.”

The everyday things I name as beauty are sometimes so small the modern world teaches us they don’t qualify for holiness. They are too small to matter. Modern thinking teaches us that the things of earth are to be measured, not to bear meaning. Yet meaning is what we so desperately crave, whether we know it or not.

There is a pervasive coarseness to our times in this moment: in our entertainment, our landscapes, our language, our ways of being with one another. What if we found the courage to resist? What if we decided to pay exquisite attention to all that is beautiful? Not because we deny the heartbreak and horror that exists around us. But because we see it all too clearly and repudiate it with every fiber of our being. Beauty is the antidote, and when we turn toward it we allow it to enliven our bodies, mind, and spirit.

In his book Life After Doom, Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, author and activist Brian McLaren calls us into this “inward migration,” into a “sovereignty of mind,” where we “withdraw from the ugliness around us and cultivate beauty within...seeing it, creating is, savoring it. Savoring beauty within will lead to beautiful outward action,” he writes.

There is Beauty waiting. It’s right in front of you.  “It is transformed by our deliberate intention,” writes Katherine May in her book Enchanted, Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. “It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning.”

It’s there in a summer breeze and the night sky. In a lover’s hand and a child’s peaceful sleep. In the fragrance of hot tea in a delicate china cup, the one your mother drank from each morning of her long and beautiful life.

I’m writing to invite you to notice Beauty in your life. You don’t have to buy anything, go anywhere, do anything special. All you need do is pay attention.  Put down your phone. Turn off the TV.  “Put on a different pair of glasses,” writer Anne Lamott says. Take a long look at around you.

I’m writing to remind you there is extraordinary beauty in the small moments of your ordinary life and how your order your day.

I’m writing about beauty as a counterweight to all the ways we’ve become disconnected from meaning.

I’m writing to assure you that noticing the Beautiful in the midst of darkness will give you courage and be a balm to your spirit.

I’m writing to encourage you to be the Beauty you want to see in the world.

I’m writing in the hope that paying attention to Beauty can help us heal ourselves, one another, and all of creation.

Here I Am

Allow the ground of

your being to be the

ground you will

stand on going forward.

~ Inner Map, a poem by Noelle Rollins, from her book Ten Thousand Acorns

Here I am. Ecce adsum, as the Latins would say.

It feels right and good to have a quiet corner of the internet to call my home.

I haven’t been posting much online these days. There seemed no good reason to add to the cacophony of voices swirling around me since the election and inaguration. I needed some time to to reflect and craft a thoughtful response based on what I know about myself, my way of being in the world, and what is mine to do as I continue walking this path into what is largely unknown.

And I needed a quiet place in which to write it. Hence, my return to this space, to drawing a boundary around the place I write about who I am becoming in this new world we’re living in.

Clearly, the months and years ahead are going to be challenging and marked by change. In the weeks before and after the election, weary of all the feelings that assaulted me, I retreated into my home and repeated these words like a mantra:  Guard me and guide me; protect and defend me; grant me wisdom and courage for the living of these days.

 Now, warily emerging from my sanctuary, I wonder: Where will I find wisdom and courage? What will be my sword and shield as I set out on this path into the unknown? What tools will not only protect and defend me, but also empower me to do what is mine to do in a world that feels so precarious?

In these last few weeks I’ve found strength in stillness, smallness, and quiet where  I can compose my thoughts, connect with my inner wisdom, and hear the sound of my soul. It feels powerful to turn off all the TV and online news, to retreat from social media. Instead, I read poetry, nonfiction, or a mystery novel. I choose inspirational podcasts instead of political commentary. I write pages and pages in my Notebook, and wait for the right time and place to share my words.

I’ve been spending time (in real life and online) with a community of family, friends, and spiritual companions. There is wisdom there, and courage in the company of loved ones: In celebrating a birthday with a precious grandson and rejoicing in the goodness he brings to the world; in bringing the gift of music to a seriously ill friend; in weekly gatherings to check in with one another, to notice and name the goodness we see around us. I made a pilgrimage to the labyrinth, and put one foot in front of the other, simply trusting the path wherever it leads.

There is satisfaction in seeking solidarity with others: In taking groceries to the food bank in our community and committing to doing so on a regular basis; in shopping at local businesses instead of big box stores or online; in offering financial support to a local organization that provides free legal assistance to immigrants; in supporting a national group that protects women’s reproductive freedom.

This way of being feels deeply authentic – coming from the truest, realest me there is, showing up in the world as a small and gentle voice of love and care. That part of me I like to affectionately call, “my bright and shining self,” This is my orientation point, my solid ground. Like I’m right where I need to be, even in a world that feels wrong.

I wonder – what might that place look like for you? How might it feel? Every one of us is unique in our human being-ness and I believe there is great wisdom and strength in those differences. We all must find our own wisdom and courage for facing the reality of life.

Something I know for sure about myself is that I carry a strong need for action, especially when things go wrong. I think a lot about what is mine to do in the world. What can I do to fix things?

Lately, in the face of so much that’s broken, I wonder if a better question is this -

Who am I to be in this world?

Maybe if each one of us begins from the center point of our most fully human selves, if we allow the ground of our being/to be the ground we stand on, perhaps we can go forward together on paths of strength and love.

That feels like solid ground for the living of these days.

I am here. Standing on it.