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.