Vellichor // Two // Alignment

Finding beauty, always

Preface: it’s my birthday next week. I am humbly asking that you share this newsletter, give a gift subscription, or become a paying subscriber and support my work. I am so grateful to have you as a reader and as part of this community and have great things planned for the months ahead! There’s currently a 20% discount on yearly subscriptions!

This week’s newsletter is a short one, as I’ve been all over the place in every capacity. I am managing multiple medical referrals and a possible new medical diagnosis, but hope to get things together as the week goes on.

There are still so many beautiful things, though, alongside the many terrible things. Lately I’ve been going on social media and feeling more and more like people are posting desperately and compulsively, hoping that some post will change the movement of the world. It all feels so awful, but I remind myself that the awfulness is what’s reported on, and that every story can be reframed. That doesn’t make the awfulness okay, but it aligns it with the beauty, which feels much less hopeless.

Last week, the climate report appeared to plunge everyone into a hopeless malaise, but honestly I saw it as fortifying. We can make a difference. It’s easier to throw up our hands than to roll up our sleeves. It’s easier to blame huge corporate entities rather than take a hard look at our own practices of consumption. This tweet actually really upset me in its framing of corporations as the primary driver of climate change, as if corporations are not powered by consumers. It’s easier if we blame someone else, though, right?

Not really. Owning our culpability in this mess gives us agency, and with agency we can create change. We’re more powerful than we think.

Eleven years ago I was in Alaska, nearing the end of my last fire season. My mom had died by suicide in May. It was one of my most beautiful summers, and also the most painful. Before my mom died, before I’d known she was going to die, I’d walked with my neighbors onto a small frozen pond in the Fairbnaksian evening. The slab of frozen water was surrounded by little spruce trees, dwarfed by the shortage or sunlight in winter. It glowed pale silver under the dark sky.

I stood at the edge, scared that if I ventured onto the ice it would break. Just for me. My neighbors skated around in their boots, but I didn’t trust anything to hold me, not after what I’d seen in my life. I wrestled with my anxieties, wanting to be brave and also being scared, and sipped on blueberry vodka cooler concocted by my neighbor with blueberries frozen from the previous year’s harvest. It was late April. I raised my eyes to gaze at the sky, hopeful.

When the first slip of florescent green appeared I gasped. It was as if a fingertip pressed gently into the bubble-edge of the sky, like I used to press into my computer screen to see the way the pressure affected the picture. The green vanished, then reappeared, tracing a glittering wave across the black sky. It was God. I had never seen God before but this was it. My neighbor laughed, The Auroras are here!

I gazed up and let the florescence absorb; waves of light; waves of dripping green and purple which appeared to fall towards us like curtains of bright snow, revealing the infinite depth of the sky. I watched and absorbed and thought of my mother, who I’d seen only weeks before. She was sick. Full of white wine and a despair I couldn’t wrest her from. She was, at that moment, surely watching television. When I was younger and it was just her and me she used to talk about Alaska, where she’d worked as a dancer. Alaska and the man who raped her. Alaska and the roiling ocean. Alaska and the Auroras. I wished she were standing next to me in the moment, so she could be reminded of the beauty and mystery of the world. That would surely have saved her.

What I’m saying is, it’s always there. Gaze upwards. Pluck a leaf from a bush and study its structure. Watch the clouds rush across the sky. In deep pain, it’s there. In hopelessness, it’s there. Beauty. Along with everything else.

Maybe right now put this down. Turn something off. Look around, outside, and find some. What is beautiful in your life right now? Please share it with us.