Beauty’s Invitation

September 17, 2025

In the past few years, I’ve written about and worked a lot with the concept of beauty. The organization I created, Radical Joy for Hard Times, is dedicated to finding and making beauty for Earth’s broken places. My book of the same name explores why that’s important and how we can do it. My most recent book, Fierce Consciousness, delves into ways of finding and making beauty when life is really tough.

Beauty’s reputation has suffered in recent years. One of my friends even discouraged me from mentioning it when I was writing Radical Joy for Hard Times. Because, as I wrote in that book, “Admitting that you believe beauty is worth paying attention to implies that you watch kitten videos on YouTube, enjoy listening to Burt Bacharach music, and probably are not paying attention to important things like the local food movement or films by Iranian women.”

And yet, we can’t help being attracted to it. I thought about that this morning as I was in my favorite coffee shop waiting for my order, and an attractive man sat down on the bench outside the store. He was probably 30 years younger than I, and I’m not in the market for a relationship … yet I noticed him. Noticed and appreciated.

Actually, I try to be open to beauty every day. I regard it as a miracle worker. Beauty seduces. Beauty wants you to come closer. It wants you to linger with it. And whether what’s calling you is a sky, a sculpture, a human, or a package wrapped with creative flair, it’s worth your while to pay attention. You won’t turn superficial if you do. In all likelihood, you’ll feel, in that moment, that the beauty of the thing you pause for spreads its medicine a little wider, so it pools into other aspects of your life, like water seeping over the soil when you water a tree you’ve just planted.

In my book I wrote that beauty won’t save your life, but I’ve changed my mind. Every time I say Yes to beauty, I am plucked up and lofted into beauty’s largesse.