beauty is worth it.

[Jesus. I feel like I lost my head for a moment (or a semester or for the last four years), but Elaine Scarry is bringing it all back.

Im going to write a lot. ]

At my best (in my perfect spaces), I spend my time collecting, pointing, closing my eyes in the sunshine and remembering why I love the world and never want to see it go. This happens when I travel, when I am pardoned from worldly expectations, when at least temporarily I am permitted to simply explore. I cant help but being curious, with finding incredible intricacies in ivy on hardwood floors, sidewalk cracks, and telephone poles. I am fascinated by seaweed intermingled with rotten bluegills and peeling paint. I have secret crushes on abandoned brick buildings and the world's endless creativity. These small treasures greet me, remind me why Im still kicking around rocks; there is so much to see, so much to appreciate.

And even with this inside of me, I feel like I have been told I am wrong wrong wrong. I am suppose to care about the world, to love the world; we are suppose to FIGHT injustice. fight fight fight. Be angry at the world and all its messiness. I should be reading DemocracyNow and eating locally grown water crest. Beauty, and my little treasures, are childish and only distract from what is important: mending the world's woes.

So, in my own uncertainty and gullibility, I have studied, read, marched, interned, prayed, meditated, and driven myself into a hole. Everything is negative down here, and honestly, a part of me has forgotten. I have forgotten WHY to save all of this: if the whole world is corrupt, miserable, and going to hell, why even fight? Why try to fix it if its all misery anyway? I can't sit in one more Seminar course and listen to why the world is a miserable, evil, trash pit of uselessness. In my own search for justice, I can not feed myself with trauma.

So, I skip class and find myself smirking at the way mud tracks on the running path in the spring fade out like ghosts on the pavement. I save the yarn scrap I found on the bottom of my shoe. The beautiful, the curiosities; they are life giving. They remind me what's worth fighting for. They are small secret's that tap on my shoulder, playing the telephone game between the divine and myself.

If the assumption in the world of academic 'Social Justice,' is that curiosity should be preferential to injustice and trauma, rather than the beauty in the world, then I don't want to be a part of this fight. I desire beauty; to capturing it, sharing it, sending it away in small envelopes or on silly blogs. I've been scared to say that in academia. Everything is so serious, so stern, but it doesn't inspire me-- tragedy and social analysis do not awaken a desire for justice within me--they overwhelm me, make me spend long afternoons in the fetal position and rainy sundays crying on the phone in parking lots.

Today, I rode in the backseat of a sunny car to Chicago for a fruit cup, and to listen to the hum of the front seat voices. On that drive, Elaine Scarry's text "On Beauty and Being Just" awakened all this in me. That simple drive was beautiful, as Scarry writes, "Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living." Today it seems so elegantly simple what I have been trying to do for four years. I have been appreciating the world, trying to remind everyone around me what is worth it, what is life giving. There is proof in the smokestacks on I-94 and the way pineapple tingles on the back of my throat. I know that feeling, I've been inside the beautiful. I have had "it," the brush with divinity. In fact, if I let my forehead relax, if I let go of everything that I think is expected of me (everything I "should" do as a college graduate), I have it most days. I can see it Sal Paradise in almost every bottle cap and heads-up penny on the street, its not hiding at all. I want to share that feeling and I know its worth fighting for, each of us deserves to see this. And isnt that the root of the fight for justice? Wanting to create a space where each of us has the ability to flourish? To experience our own fulfillment as we acquaint ourselves with divinity?

Instead of being useless in the fight for justice, Scarry defends my curriosities, she claims "Beauty is, at the very least, innocent of the charges against it, and it may even be the case that far from damaging our capacity to attend to problems of injustice, it instead intensifies the pressure we feel to repair existing injustices." Beauty does not stupefy us, or lead us to ignorance of injustice; it instead awakens a desire to create a world where each of us can experience it.

Scarry writes that beauty does not deter us in our fight for justice, but instead enlivens us to its purpose. Beauty is lifegiving, it reflects the divine and reminds us of our own divinity, of our worth, this whole place's worth. Scarry writes, "Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs be brought into relation," Beauty enables us to be curious about what is greater than us, the divine, and drives us to be a part of the creation and protection of what is beautiful, "What is beautiful prompts the mind to move chronologically back in the search for precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation, and does all this with a kind of urgency as though one's life depended on it...The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring enduring sources of conviction--to locate what is true."

Scarry reminded me that my vocation is possibly not addressing injustices, but instead addressing what is worth fighting for, why we must alleviate those injustices. Each of us deserves a full stomach, a healthy body, and a safe home in order to be able to experience the beauty that I have been given an eye, and desire, to appreciate. Our desires can not be wasted, or taken lightly. And those working so diligently for peace, they need to be reminded over and over and over again why they "labor, struggle, [and] wrestle with the world."

As I look back at my 'education,' it seems obvious that I can't keep reading about genocides and starving babies, but I don't think that that means I have to disregard the fight for justice. Infact, I think my organic desire to draw attention to beauty might be exactly how I can continue on this path. Maybe I am not a bundle of contradictions, maybe my heart wants to alleviate suffering so strongly, because I can see so clearly what's worth being alive for. I cant spend my life pointing at whats wrong, but I can spend it pointing at whats worth fighting for;

"Beautiful things always carry greetings from other worlds within them, [thus] the perceiver is led to a more capacious regard for the world"

[In the spirit of the beautiful things in my life, and something silly to love today, here is one lovable reason to move to Columbus, Ohio (and a little prize for reading all of this!): tacotruckscolumbus.com]