Stop! It's a Beauty Emergency!
be excited, have zero chill
It was a Saturday night around 7pm. Tired, I got off the bus; head down, getting home was the only mission on my mind. And yet, something compelled me to look up as I turned onto the path towards my flat. There it was: the moon. Low and large, it rested on top of a dark fringe of trees across the field, a luminous silvery-bronze ball of light. I called my husband immediately.
“Come to the window,” I said. “Can you see the moon?”
“Wow. I’ve never seen it look like that.” Neither had I. We continued talking about the moon, me on the ground, my husband a few floors above me, when a stranger came out from our block.
“Are you coming in or out?” she asked.
“In,” I said, “but I’m just looking at the moon”. I felt slight embarrassment and momentarily regretted my vulnerability: that’s not the kind of thing people say to strangers, would she think I was too much?
“It does look nice actually,” she said, and stopped to take a picture on her way out.
For a moment, all three of us, me, a stranger and my husband, all stopped to look at the moon. As I climbed the stairs to my flat, I thought about how special that moment was. There will never be another moment where the moon is that colour and that position in the sky, and we will all be available, aligned and ready to be present.
We stopped for what poet Maggie Smith calls a ‘beauty emergency’.1 In her house, whenever anyone calls ‘beauty emergency’, everyone else must stop what they’re doing and see beauty. Why ‘emergency’? “Because no one comes running when you yell sunrise.” (I do!)
It’s urgent to attend to beauty! In the same way an ambulance rushes to save a life, beauty is life-affirming medicine for our soul. Beauty invites us to pause and disrupt the imperative to grind and keep our heads down. Look up, beauty says, look around. Remember who you really are - your spirit, your roots, your connectedness to all that is seen and unseen. All that has ever been and will be is contained here in this very moment. You cannot wait because in a few seconds, it will have changed. The moon will have moved, the colours of the sunset will have changed - so yes, when I call you, you must look now, and no, I can’t take a picture as it won’t be the same.
Attending to what is fleeting is deeply valuable. We remind ourselves of the fleeting nature of all things and we are brought closer to the inherent awe and grief in being and feeling truly alive. Part of what stirs us when watching the sun rise or set isn’t just its literal beauty, but the way awe, change and loss are bound in the same moment. In a blink, the colours will change. In a blink, the sun will be gone and all we will be left with is memory.
I’m reminded of a quote in Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva: “I’m trying to seize the fourth dimension of this instant-now so fleeting it’s already gone because it’s already become a new instant-now that’s also already gone. Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe…”
Can you feel the urgency, the need to attend to the now? To be confronted with the urgency of our aliveness feels a mammoth task when we have been and are encouraged to be disconnected and disavow our basic need to feed our spirit. But opportunities abound for nourishment. As you read this, between 30 to 40 trillion cells are working to keep you alive. You can think of a person who makes you smile, a song you love. A film you can’t wait to recommend. These are all routes back to our aliveness.
This is a call to all people: have zero chill. Be excited and enthusiastic about life and all that moves and compels you bring other people in on its goodness. Be as stirred by the quiet beauty of the world, as to what horrifies you, remembering, as you look up to moon, we live under the same blanket of stars.
PROMPT:
This week, make it your mission to find a beauty emergency. When you do, share it with at least one person. How does it feel to stop and be present to beauty? How does it feel when you share it with someone? Leave a comment to share your discoveries, I always love hearing from you :)
See you in two weeks,
I love this idea. Thanks for sharing. Also I hard relate to memes that say things like "my love language is look at the moon!" x