The thing that’s beautiful right now is that I can feel my heartbeat through the vein in my temple that’s giving me this headache. Maybe too much light or too much concentration on the sad and beautiful blue and black things raining down around and in and on me each day.

The thing that’s beautiful right now is that the laundry is done and I used two hands to fold it and two hands to scrub it and my one body, stiff and aware, is holding those two hands.

The thing that’s beautiful right now is that everything is on fire and when I sit around a fire, I’m mesmerized by it, something primal, original and relative arises. I can feel its heat and light and need to turn my face away but the penetration and recollection is already layers deep. And how the shadows dance and flicker and paint stories in the sky and the fire jumps mountains and canyons. And we have always needed fire to survive and we have always needed to be careful of fire and I don’t know why that’s so hard to remember.

The thing that’s beautiful right now is autumn and what that means, that we are chasing darkness, or it is chasing us in the come up to the winter solstice – where every culture through time had rituals and rites to celebrate the darkness of the womb before the birth. A birth. His birth. Her birth. Your birth. Their birth. Our birth.

The thing that’s beautiful right now is that we are people who have been facing existential threat after existential threat and we have never been so distant and removed from one another. What is our existence without one another and would the crust of the earth rise centimeters or even meters if we were to all go away. And will anyone be around to tell that story of when the earth was heavier.

The thing that’s beautiful right now is that we are on a precipice and we are on land that was never ours and sometimes we think we can control anything and that’s a colonial mindset that is hard to recall what came before it, that there was a before, a steady drip of ingenuity and wisdom and knowledge and observation all tied together and known now as science, when before, it was survival. And if we listen to the wind and the dreams and petroglyphs and the sigh of the tree and the epigenetic tendrils we may be able to pull ourselves back, to walk it all off, to look at the rubble and ash and emerge, cleansed and, again, whole.