Now look at those peaches, won’t you? There’s a farm near my home where you can still U-pick. Blueberries, cherries, raspberries apples and yes, peaches. We go there several times each season. This used to be a part of people’s lives—picking and choosing their own fruit. Flowing with the seasons. People would know when it was a good year for green beans. A bad year for apples.

I can think of few things more beautiful in my life, few things that ground me in my natural environment more than retrieving a harvest of fruit or veggies from my beautiful valley. Every summer I stand there among the peaches and cherries and I am in wonderment, and I hope it will never end. I hope it’ll always be this spiritually awake for me.

I am lucky to live where I live. Perhaps we’re all lucky to live where we live, but I feel lucky to live where I live. Standing in nature, in the summer, in the golden late afternoon hours with a mouth full of sun warmed peach may be as close to heaven as we get in this lifetime and I’m committed to drinking those experiences in as often as I can.

My favorite song is a tune by the incomparable Macy Gray. It’s called “Beauty in the World”. Maybe you’ve heard it? If not, stop what you’re doing, right here, right now, open a browser window or the youtube app and go listen to Beauty in the World.

“Shake your booties, boys and girls, for the beauty in the world. Pick your diamond, pick your pearl, there is beauty in the world.”

That’s what it’s all about. Picking our diamonds. Picking our pearls. Recognizing that there’s beauty in the world, and what’s more we can bring it! We can build it! We can be the source of so much beauty.

A world of beauty, to me, is more of a concept to be believed in than a product to be found or owned. We can find beauty in the smallest things.

Once, when I was young, I read about someone who sectioned off a 1-meter square of forest. He drove stakes in the ground and strung string and he got inside the square and stayed there for as long as it took for him to fully appreciate the fullness of the square. He eventually began to recognize individual blades of grass. He watched insects go about their lives, scooting over and making room for them. I think that’s profoundly beautiful—to register attention in our lives. I want to bring that attention to the beautiful everywhere I go.

I have a beautiful relationship with my brother. My brother is like me but larger and kinder. He’s five years my junior and I wish we’d always loved one another the way we do now. I wish we’d known better. I wish we’d known that two are better than one, and together we’re more than the sum of our parts. People, I think, genuinely like having either of us in the room, but not nearly as much as having both of us in a room. We’re funnier, and we’re friendlier when we’re together. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about my brother is the way he loves my family. The comfort my children feel with him and his. We could, if pressed, live under a single roof, I have no doubts. There would be a little friction, sure. That’s people. But we would thrive together.

Our childhood was a childhood. It was beautiful and awful and frightening and comforting and clean and dirty. And we are, to one another, ones who can be trusted to hold one another up.

I have a beautiful relationship with my wife of twenty years. We have been through the deepest valleys and we’ve been through the coldest storms. And our love for one another has been like a blast of sunlight in my life. Over and over she’s had opportunities and good reasons to allow distance to come between us and consistently she’s chosen not to. She is so beautiful.

I have beautiful friendships with people who love me and care deeply for me and say encouraging things to me on the internet when I do writing projects.

I am a baker, and there’s nothing more beautiful than baked goods made with a heart of kindness and love. Have you smelled beurre noisette as it’s cooking? Really spent time smelling the changes as it deepens in color and clarifies? Have you experienced victory in the kitchen? Attempting something just a little bit outside your skill level and reaping the reward of realizing it’s very much within your skill level?

And I have a beautiful sense of importance for cultivating kindness and love in my life. Not everyone has these things. I am, again, the bearer of an embarrassment of riches.

There is obviously ugliness in the world also, and we’ve talked about some of those things. There is myopic hatred and fear and darkness and there are all of the ways we can treat one another when those things are guiding us.

But as the very wise and kind and beautiful Martin Luther King famously said:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

We cannot out-hate the hate filled. I know; I’ve tried. We can only out-love them. We can not out-ugly the ugly things in this life. We can only fight against them with real beauty, whole-cloth beauty woven on the loom of our experiences and choices. So shake your booties, boys and girls. There is beauty in the world.

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