“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.” —Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
DON'T HESITATE Mary Oliver If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
Do you ever feel so moved by beauty it hurts? Like when you’re driving down the road, and the vibrance of the sudden reds and yellows bursting from the trees all around hits you—SMACK—in the chest. There’s a surprising pang as you gaze in wonder at nature’s tapestry.
Or when you’re listening to a symphony, like Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, and the orchestra and choir crescendos in triumph. The chords building and resonating through your ears and somehow coming out as tears of joy?
When you’re walking through an art museum, and a piece stops you in your tracks. You can’t quite explain it, but the artwork you’re bolding makes you feel things.
Stories can do this too. You finish reading an exquisitely beautiful novel and no matter if the ending was happy or sad, you have a lump in your throat when you get to the last page, because it was just so good.
Sometimes you laugh so hard your ribs ache. And you think, when was the last time I did that?
Or the kindness of a stranger or the unexpected generosity of a friend causes tears to well up in gratitude. This is beauty too.
The world is full of horror, conflict, brutality, and death. Even for those with the privilege of a relatively safe life, ordinary tragedies and the heaviness of being human is commonplace.
Maybe that’s why beauty strikes us so viscerally. Maybe that’s why beauty hurts.
The sharp juxtaposition of something surprisingly beautiful in the midst of an otherwise difficult or even humdrum existence pulls at our senses with such force that we can’t help but be astonished. Oh! our heart sings. Oh, yes!
We feel a twinge of pain when beholding something beautiful, as if a limb has been snapped back into joint. A sharp pain, and then relief. Like two pieces of a whole fitting together at last.
—NK
Yes -- living life means living with the contrast of both/and. Which I wouldn't have any other way.
Beautiful description of life. ❤️