Beauty emerging from the dust

beauty-emerging-from-the-dust

There are times when we simply can’t imagine something beautiful emerging from the ash heap.

Times in our lives. And times in our world, like now.

Yet our living system has the propensity for life by its very nature. And life is beautiful.

The beauty we yearn for is more than skin deep, often growing in our place of brokenness.

Like the dark places in the soil where seeds break open and find their way to the light.

Emerging too soon would be disastrous.

So we wait, learn patience, and don’t rush to brush off the dirt.

Because beauty is not a rescue job.

‘For the Eight-Year-Old in You’

+ On Being Podcast, 17th March 2022

Last weekend I listened to the life-filled conversation between Krista Tippett and the children’s author, Kate DiCamillo. There were laughter and tears, in equal measure, and honesty and wisdom.

At the core of the exchange was the question about how real should we be with our young readers and our children?

What emerged was a moving reflection on the way life gifts us beauty to share with others, even from the place of sadness and heartbreak.

Ashes aren’t our identity, but they can become the dirt in which the beauty of our life grows.

Or to quote a beautiful insight from Rumi, which I came across recently:

“Don’t think that the garden loses its ecstasy in winter. It’s quiet, but the roots down there are riotous.”

+ Rumi

~

This week

Beauty – in the words of Alan Moore, Fyodor Dostoevsky, John O’Donohue, William Stafford (and me)