the beauty that is everywhere

love notes to the world at large.

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Collect stories

When someone speaks to you, let everything slow down, and listen very closely. This is how you will get a glimpse of someone's true spirit, and maybe share a little of yours with them. You can practice this at first with people you already really like, and then as you ...

Illinois

This was a very different sunrise over corn. First it started flashing me its color behind the St. Louis arch. Then over the Missouri River and into Illinois where the colors of the sun spreading across the enormous sky and the fields and the road were all I wanted in the ...

We are a mile high

Over a mile, actually. Altitude 6,000 ft. Heading into Flagstaff.

Camper Dream

In the dream last night, the tri-level where I once lived was collapsing, much like -- you know -- the memories give way in the film "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." At the ceiling on the ground level, you could see the floor above beginning to disintegrate, and ...

Take Polaroids of Your TV Screen

Take Polaroids of your tv screen while Lucas dances, black eyes, black hair, black turtleneck, lanky Lucas, while he dances, no tripod, no vertical hold, no pause, just you leaning sweet into Lucas. Make 1,000 copies on photo glossy, staple gun each glossy to a telephone pole every mile from ...

Kenny in that Grand Canyon [video]

Here is a video of Kenny Crowley, beauty-walker, singer-songwriter, son of mine, singing his anthem to the Grand Canyon and to all of earth. Last summer he retrofitted his pickup truck so it would be a camper/home on wheels and did a big loop during July and August. He left ...

Sunset

Sunset Boulevard to the water, then up the coast to Santa Barbara as the sun moves spectacularly from our sight. Image by Corie Crowley, Coriedoesmyhair.com.

Road

I am on a road trip to the mountains, feeling completely dogless. Where the hell is Eli Crowley. The car is packed with gear and coolers, heading west. He is supposed to be in the back, wind fluttering his feathers, meeting my eyes in the rear view, lighting up every ...

Being Grateful

I've started to notice that there is something about being grateful that seems to change my way of being in the world. And it seems to me to be another aspect of this notion of having a choice. I can find something or someone to be grateful for. Even if it's ...

It was always about the dance

You know that, don't you, Scott Hastings? Maybe the Ballroom Dancing Federation doesn't have any new moves. And you're bored with the old ones. Aren't you, Scott? Wouldn't you rather dance your own dance now? Wherever your feet want to go?

World Exploded Into Love All Around Me

And now, I sit, with my hand on my heart, full of love for Bob Dylan, that wondrous, mighty seer who has decided the time has come for the story of the Titanic TO BE SUNG. Christomighty, and amen, brother. You are, for sure, the fiddler I want fiddling whilst ...

Radio silence (Sedona/beauty/road trip)

Here is a post from a few days ago I thought I had published... "Heading toward Sedona now. Just saw an elk jerky roadside stand. The sign said "really good." I believe them...." You will note the radio silence since just before entering Sedona. Meet me there, all my beloveds reading ...

The Road

There is something about a road trip, with its vast changing panoramas of field, sky, city, flowers, truck wheels, with its swooping birds and deep possibilities, that lets me hold life a little looser, more delicately, giving it room to breathe.

Purple

Oh my goodness I am so in love with the lady in the truckstop where I just went in for ice and beef jerky. She has purple eyeshadow and pink lipstick and dark moviestar hair, staring off into the desert when I opened the glass door. This is going in the ...

Diners Are Portals

Laundromats are portals, too. You know what I mean. You walk in, the color is different. The people have appeared there for each other, converged on the place to do ordinary things with great beauty, like drink coffee softly from a heavy mug or lift the lid to the Speed ...

A Chromatic Typewriter: For Re-Writing History

More loveliness from Making it Lovely. This is a conceptual art piece by Tyree Callahan. So dreamy. Image compilation by Making It Lovely. Art and Image by Tyree Callahan.

Climbing the Tor

It is early, early in the morning. It doesn't feel like it's late at night. I woke at 2 a.m. and I love that sometimes. The stillness. The poetry of middle of the night thoughts. Would I love it as much if every night some wakefulness awakened me, and my ...

Dance is a very powerful drug

"Dance is a very powerful drug, Mr. Keane. If embraced judiciously, it can exorcise demons, access deep seated emotions and color your life in joyous shades of brilliant magenta that you never knew existed. But, one must shoulder its challenges with intrepid countenance if one is ever to reap its ...

What happens if the power goes out?

Just pose the question to yourself, whether or not there's an impending weather event. What happens? Have you got excellent flashlights, fondue pots, Viewmaster sets and drawers full of good candles? Gallons of clean water, Sterno, batteries? It’s a comforting thing to have provisions. But still more comforting to know ...

Stories

I have things to tell you, you know. It won't take long. Or it may take a hundred years. And I will be listening, because you have things to say, too. We have stories to put together like bubbles, bumping lazily into each other, fusing, popping, suddenly boundaryless, suddenly all ...

Heck yeah, Caitlin

I see I have some catching up to do. I'm only halfway through Caitlin Moran's "How to Be a Woman," which is HILarious and brilliant, and LITERALLY made me want to stand up on the chair at Elwood Thompson's one fine morning and shout out "I AM A FEMINIST!" just ...

Stranger than Fiction

Do you ever feel as though your life is being narrated? Or as though you may want to turn to Dustin Hoffman for metaphysical advice? Then this little gem of a movie is one of your new best friends. The luminous beings that appear in this movie are: Will Farrell, ...

Let the Mystery Be - Iris Dement (VIDEO)

I could listen to this forever. "Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from. Everybody's worrying where they're going to go when the whole thing's done. No one knows for certain, so if it's all the same to me, I think I'll just let the mystery be."

Lately

For many years, whenever I've sat down and asked myself something along the lines of: "What does your divine right life look like?", something in me would flash back a vision of gorgeous walls of jars. Jars filled with beautiful food and lots and lots of dried herbs. Lovely colors. ...

What if?

What if no job or house or car or ideal weight or ideal husband is what is going to make you shine? What if there’s a bucket of magic in your secret heart and everything you witness stands transfixed, watching you, awaiting that moment when you smile and start flinging that sparkle everywhere. What if everything simply ...

Station Wagons

Just came across this gorgeous post called "Station Wagon Living" on English Muse. Makes me real happy. Here's a photo of my little sister sitting in front of one of the many station wagons of our childhoods. We would, like every American family, load them up in the summer with coolers ...

Yesterday On the River

My darling son Kenny was in town this weekend and we went to the James River, by way of what's known in these parts as Texas Beach. You depart ordinary reality slowly, via a path from a park near Maymont which seems initially rather, well, ordinary. This is, ...

Soap

I wash my glass in Palmolive dish soap in the kitchen at work and it very sweetly catapults me back 28 years to where my babies are babies and I am washing dishes very sweetly in the kitchen in upstate New York. Any moment one of them might come around ...

Treat. Yo. Self.

You know I have a Parks & Rec obsession, right? (It's my Pleasantville.) Anyway, here is one of the many, many reasons why:

Love Beams Back

Somehow, I would pour the colors of this room where I sit, of the birds that sing outside my window, of the knockout pink roses which have begun to multiply in bloom, into this liquid page where I write. This page which goes to you, which beams all I would ...

Everyday Adventures in Beingness: Some Ideas

Here are some things that might be fun. Or might not. You decide. Research memory. Or Joseph Campbell. Or the workings of the brain. Or the Shakers, or Diane Arbus, or Walker Evans. Wallpaper the bathroom with Bazooka bubblegum comics. Plan a weird ass party. Make yourself some paper mache birds and let them ...

Where is it, this true home of yours?

Your true home is where you live in your heart. The place where you are connected to love and the way it moves through the world, permeating everything, beaming out from toll booth ladies, impatient clerks, flat tires, cows mooing, people who interrupt you, redwood trees, sun setting on the ...

Bubbles

In the writing group last night, we wrote. I kept turning on the porch light, walking out to meet the things that would be written, but I just saw them glimmering off in the backstreets, holding still when I paused to listen. They are on their way to dance parties, to ...

Angels in plain sight

Imagine that everywhere you go, there are angels in plain sight. Your waiter, for example. Here is what happened to me one day several years back when I sat in one of my favorite coffee shops, writing, brainstorming, considering what my next move in life would be. I looked up from ...

Goodwater

Kenny told me once when he was little that he'd been drinking godwater from flowers. Goodwater/Godwater. Same/same.

Believe me

Some friends of mine started a writing group around the beginning of the last decade, and this is how I first met them. I am so deeply grateful that I did, as they are the loveliest people and writers: Leah, and Nathan, and Melanie. And RaasaLeela, who was in ...

Magic Wands are Regular

I love moving my car to a new spot every two hours. Because it means a small adventure, regularly scheduled. What will it be? Today it is a trip to the yoga studio to check it out and pick up a schedule, a little pink card I can hold in ...

Les émotifs anonymes

Yes, okay. Oui, ca va. Je comprend.

Being Tree-like

You may not seem to be doing anything much in the way of production, like clocking work hours or acquiring goods, or writing Pulitzer Prize winning books. Imagine, though, that there are qualities in you that are very tree-like. You stand with roots deep in the ground, soaking up water, ...

Oxygen

"Breathe," someone said to me yesterday. Good idea. #survivaltactic. How is it I had forgotten about breathing? Taking in oxygen. Even when I have worked fourteen straight days and am doing little beyond working very hard, eating and sleeping. Or especially then. I can still breathe in and out. I can still ...

Little Portals

Sometimes I want to give you everything. Yes, you, reading this now. I sit in the morning darkened by the rain, listening to the tea pot work up to a whistle, making precise Morse code clicks on my iPad keyboard as I type this. I have just read this morning's ...

Choices

I am at Silver Diner for the first time, having a delightful Saturday morning. I've helped my Dad shovel two truckloads of mulch and, after my Belgian waffles, Amish eggs and nitrate-free bacon, I am going over to lounge around with my beautiful sister and talk of anything/everything. A lovely young ...

Ordinary Life

A quote from Jan Frazier, "When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening" --What do I want for myself? I want to learn how to pare from my consciousness all that is not gratitude. I want to cease praying for anything I do not already have, but pray ...

Loving Kindness

Send love into your body -- your heart, your cheekbones, your belly. Know that you are love in human form. Beam out love to everyone you have ever met. This kind of love you will beam needs nothing back; it needs nothing more than to make its way from your heart ...

Tap here

Tap here to begin writing, someone whispered, and she realized it had already begun. It had started somewhere after her telephone call with a friend from her early life, from when she was some inconsequential, flimsy thing unrecognizable to her now and it had fluttered, birdlike, when she began her ...

Into the mystic

Ah, it's played at last. No road trip would be complete without it.

The Mother of Language

I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful ...

Wyoming, further

The land flattens out, stretches further. Yarrow grows at the roadside. Treeless, here where you'd have to go so deep for water. Scattered cattle ranches, the continental divide. Ethereal, butter-colored place.

Everything

In that Leonard Cohen film I posted last time, LC talks of being interested in going through his days in a state of grace. And if he is not in a state of grace, he goes back to bed. That he says this in response to a question from a ...

The Kool-Aid Wino, and other stories

These short stories are continually luminous to me, and when I read them -- or when I breathed them in and out later, after they'd become a part of me -- I was so pleased to be in a world where they had appeared. They warm up the place considerably. The ...

The definition of happiness

Happy Sunday, you beautiful world. Today we meditate on happiness, here at TheBeautyThatIsEverywhere.com. Play this lovely little video montage of “Roman Holiday” put together by RavewoodLamenti for her sister’s birthday. When you see Audrey Hepburn sleeping happily on the bench, drowsily say these words for her: “SO O O O HAPPY…”
And then, perhaps, pay a visit to the incredibly lovely Wordswarm.net and look up the definition of happiness….here are a couple of excerpts from Wordswarm to get you started. (Also, be sure and check out the other Projects and Amusements of the founder of that site, Mark A. Thomas of New York, New York.)

Webster’s 1828 Dictionary

HAP’PINESS, n. [from happy.] The agreeable sensations which spring from the enjoyment of good; that state of a being in which his desires are gratified, by the enjoyment of pleasure without pain; felicity; but happiness usually expresses less than felicity, and felicity less than bliss. Happiness is comparative. To a person distressed with pain, relief from that pain affords happiness; in other cases we give the name happiness to positive pleasure or an excitement of agreeable sensations. Happiness therefore admits of indefinite degrees of increase in enjoyment, or gratification of desires. Perfect happiness, or pleasure unalloyed with pain, is not attainable in this life.
2. Good luck; good fortune.
3. Fortuitous elegance; unstudied grace.
For there’s a happiness as well as care.

Moby Thesaurus

Easy Street, acceptance, affluence, appropriateness, beatification, beatitude, becomingness, bed of roses, bewitchment, blessedness, bliss, blissfulness, blitheness, blithesomeness, brightness, cheer, cheerfulness, cheeriness, cheery vein, civility, cloud nine, clover, comfort, composure, content, contentedness, contentment, decency, decorousness, decorum, delectation, delight, ease, easy circumstances, ecstasy, ecstatics, elation, enchantment, enjoyment, entire satisfaction, eupeptic mien, euphoria, exaltation, exhilaration, exuberance, felicity, fitness, fittingness, fleshpots, fulfillment, gaiety, geniality, genteelness, gentility, gladness, gladsomeness, glee, good cheer, gracious life, gracious living, heaven, high spirits, hopefulness, intoxication, jollity, joy, joyance, joyfulness, joyousness, jubilation, lap of luxury, life of ease, loaves and fishes, luxury, meetness, optimism, overhappiness, overjoyfulness, paradise, peace of mind, pleasantness, pleasure, properness, propriety, prosperity, prosperousness, radiance, rapture, ravishment, reconcilement, reconciliation, resignation, rightness, rosy expectation, sanguine humor, sanguineness, satisfaction, security, seemliness, seventh heaven, success, suitability, sunniness, sunshine, the affluent life, the good life, thriving condition, transport, unalloyed happiness, upward mobility, urbanity, velvet, weal, wealth, welfare, well-being, winsomeness

It was always about the dance

You know that, don’t you, Scott Hastings?

Maybe the Ballroom Dancing Federation doesn’t have any new moves.

And you’re bored with the old ones. Aren’t you, Scott?

Wouldn’t you rather dance your own dance now? Wherever your feet want to go?

Let the Mystery Be – Iris Dement (VIDEO)

I could listen to this forever. “Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from. Everybody’s worrying where they’re going to go when the whole thing’s done. No one knows for certain, so if it’s all the same to me, I think I’ll just let the mystery be.”

One Love, One Heart (VIDEO)

This video, a compilation piece performed by musicians all around adding their part, had me weeping. See how beautiful we are when we all sing together? Now is when we remember we really are one heart.

Elijah

Road trip soundtrack: “Elijah,” by the Mountain Goats.

(Here’s the back story. Eli is the name of my dog that sailed into the mystic this past September. On my road trip back across the country after he died, he was much on my mind. He still is. He always is. This is what happens when pure love graces you: it comes to you and it never leaves. So this song called Elijah just kept playing on my iPhone shuffle as I made my way east.)

Jackie Mancini, you amaze me. [video]

Blues Run The Games – Jackson C. Frank Ukulele Cover

For Memories’ Sake: A Documentary (VIDEO)

I saw For Memories’ Sake at the James River Film Festival in Richmond last year and spent most of the time with tears streaming down my face at how beautiful it is: this young filmmaker’s epic tribute to her grandmother, Angela Singer, who took a dozen photographs a day for the past thirty-five years. 150,000 photos, plus some heart-wrenching video. Something changed in me sitting in that dark room watching this film and I am forever in love with these women, so gorgeous and so fierce in their devotion.

Here’s the trailer:

God, I Love Matthew Ryan (VIDEO)

Who wouldn’t? He’s lovely as can be.

Is there anything more beautiful than this? [video: The Frames, Star Star **]

Julie’s Bollywood Dream Lives in Holly’s Backyard [video]

When was living in the Bay area last summer and was homesick for my girls in Richmond, I just put this video on. Aren’t they wondrous?

Julie had always wanted to be in a Bollywood movie. Her dear friends saw no reason why this couldn’t be so. So Heidi choreographed the dance moves, Holly hosted the location, and Katie arranged with her filmmaker husband James to film the whole thing. So now Julie’s in a Bollywood movie. And you can watch it right now. (I was working that day, so I missed the whole thing. Blerg.)

Mural Craft
The town comes through here. My wife combs their hair, adjusts their chins with her…
LaPorte
LaPorte, Indiana Trailer (by Jason Bittner & Joe Beshenkovsky) from Princeton Architectural…
for Kenny
…
for Corie
Iron and Wine perform 'Lion's Mane' on Sound Opinions from WBEZ on…
Everything
In that Leonard Cohen film I posted last time, LC talks of being interested in going through his…
Bubbles
In the writing group last night, we wrote. I kept turning on the porch light, walking out to…
my/mother/earth
My mother just showed me a page from a newspaper she'd saved from 1979 and tucked into her knitting…
River
you are the…
Tap here
Tap here to begin writing, someone whispered, and she realized it had already begun. It had started…
Momma Love Tea
Oh, my darlings, it has been most of the winter since I've written here. Kenny called me on his way…

LaPorte
LaPorte, Indiana Trailer (by Jason Bittner & Joe Beshenkovsky) from Princeton Architectural…
Heck yeah, Caitlin
I see I have some catching up to do. I'm only halfway through Caitlin Moran's "How to Be a…
PS
P.S. I have just a little more to say to you this morning, and it is this. J'adore Charles Simic.…
In the lovely month of September
Two much-awaited-by-moi masterpieces have come in to the world this September: Bob Dylan's…
Lately
For many years, whenever I've sat down and asked myself something along the lines of: "What does…
The Kool-Aid Wino, and other stories
These short stories are continually luminous to me, and when I read them -- or when I breathed them…
When I Am
Well said, Mary Oliver. Well said. When I Am Among the Trees, by Mary…
The Foxfire Books: How to Make Moonshine, Rain and Fiddles
My friend Katie, who grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, mentioned the "hippy Foxfire…
The Happiness Project
And while we are on the subject of happiness this week, let's give a shout out to The Happiness…
Link Love: Michael Pollan's Food Rules Animated (VIDEO)
Posted by BrainPickings.com, "Michael Pollan's Food Rules Animated in Stop-Motion" Just lovely. …

Mother Mountain
…
This guy
Pure genius and love in action. …
Momma Love Tea
Oh, my darlings, it has been most of the winter since I've written here. Kenny called me on his way…
Up to the Mountain
Patty Griffin's singing me up to the mountain as I head to Asheville for the holy days. Ahhhh,…
Plants to keep near
Well, this is pretty cool. Plants that clean up the air for you by eliminating formaldehyde and…
Rainwater
How brilliant is this? The elegant solution: store rainwater in your soil, where it's needed. …
Living the dream, baby
Lovely Northern Exposure. …
Yesterday On the River
My darling son Kenny was in town this weekend and we went to the James River, by way of what's…
My Planet: Healing with Whales and Other Stories
My dear and lovely friend Leah Lamb has launched My-Planet.org, and with it brings to life her…
Animal, you, animal, me
These images by Gregory Colbert in his exhibit, Ashes and Snow, make me feel completely weepy. Just…