Tag: beautiful

Good (?) Sunday afternoon.

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Good (?) Sunday afternoon.

Those of you who follow along with me on this wildly spasmodic blog, you will understand that this Swan couple have become a fixture here (obsession, maybe?). This couple and their cygnets have been a profound source of joy for the neighborhood (and esp. for me).

Swans typically mate for life. They generally return to the same nesting spot year after year. And this pair built their giant nest along the break wall on Weed Avenue again this year. The nest was stood up sometime in mid to late April. (Photo: 5:50 am. May 9, 2026)

So, each morning, I drive down Weed Avenue in anticipation of seeing my friends, and wondering if the cygnets have arrived. And for those of you who are counting, it’s been 2,210 consecutive (almost) days on this morning walk at Cove Island Park, like in a row.

Well….

Continue reading “Good (?) Sunday afternoon.” →

You believe there is something?

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You believe there is something? she asks. I try to, yeah, Ivan answers. Some kind of order in the universe, at least. I do feel that sometimes. Listening to certain music, or looking at art. Even playing chess, although that might sound weird. It’s like the order is so deep, and it’s so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all. And at other times, I think it’s just chaos, and there’s nothing. Maybe the whole idea of order just comes from some evolutionary advantage, whatever it is. We recognise patterns when there are no patterns. I don’t know. I’m not explaining myself very well. But when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God. Like there’s a meaning behind everything.

— Sally Rooney, Intermezzo: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 24, 2024)

Lightly Child, Lightly

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Finally day breaks over things that I can’t predict, as I cannot predict myself. Only a stone, a celestial body, a fool can, sometimes, be predictable. Finally day breaks over a circumstantial, differentiated, risky, improbable world, as concrete, multicolored, unexpected, and, yes, beautiful as the one I see, feel, touch, admire.

— Michel Serres, in Italo Calvino’s from “Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle Alliance” in “The Written World and the Unwritten World: Essays. Translated by Ann Goldstein. (Mariner Books Classics, January 17, 2023) 

Notes:

  • Photo: Daybreak. 29° F, feels like 21° F.  6:00 to 7:00 am. March 16, 2023. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. See more photos from yesterday’s daybreak walk here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

What real people look like

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I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table.

Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they don’t have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. That’s how it works. And that’s very appealing too.

Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush.

Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say – what, this is it? They’re kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because it’s unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or they’ll yelp.

Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I don’t know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as you’re all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right?

Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that “I can stop hanging on now, I’m safe” – a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and we’re easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: I’m in it for the glow.

I’ll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.”

— Dale Favier, What People Really Look Like (Portland Home Massage, September 2, 2013)

A well-cultivated mind comes to recognize the good, the true and the beautiful

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I learned calligraphy in the seventh grade when my classmate’s mother taught the basics during an afternoon art class. In my case, it was pearls before swine. I was hardly an apt pupil. Art was where I parked myself between recess and after-school soccer. But even in my grubby pre-adolescence, her elegant pen strokes struck me as beautiful…

I’ve never employed my chirographic skill apart from that homework assignment. I do, however, remember the lesson vividly for three reasons.

First, it taught me there is beauty in this world. Some things are pleasing when seen; calligraphy is such a thing. It is beautiful to behold and drew me out of my pubescent self.

Second, beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but many see beauty in the same things. Some objects are man-made and others are natural, but attraction to beautiful things is nearly universal. This speaks to an ineffable longing written on our hearts.

Third, we each have the capacity to create beauty through the choices we make and things we do. Not all we do will be beautiful, but it all has the potential to be. The gift of freedom behind all these choices, made and to be made, is itself beautiful.

I’m glad I was dialed into middle-school art class that day so long ago. An impromptu calligraphy lesson taught me a lot about beauty in this world and the one to come.

— Mike Kerrigan, from My First Lesson in Beauty (wsj, July 30, 2022). Kerrigan is an attorney in Charlotte, NC

Notes:

  • Post and Post Title inspiration: From a response to this article by Jim Reardon: I enjoyed Mike Kerrigan’s “My First Lesson in Beauty” (op-ed, July 30). Mine came when I encountered Shakespeare in ninth grade. Never had I imagined language could be so powerful and, yes, beautiful. I share Mr. Kerrigan’s skepticism that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A well-cultivated mind comes to recognize the good, the true and the beautiful, whether in art, nature, science or noble acts.
  • Photo by Diana Schroder-Bode via unsplash