When Beauty Visits
Living Room
“Beauty does not linger; it only visits.” These words by John O'Donohue echo in my mind as I sit in the quiet of my home, my sanctuary, though it still feels more like a guesthouse to me than a refuge. Two months, or is it really only two? Since I moved in here and still, the walls don't quite hold my memories, the floorboards don’t yet know my step. But today, something shifted. I was sitting in my bedroom living room and I noticed this soft orange and pinkish hue dancing on the wall of the bathroom. The door was ajar, just enough for me to peer through and see this gentle light filling the silhouette of the shower window, painting the room with a warmth that felt like an unexpected embrace.
This house, I think, is beginning to introduce itself to me, showing me its hidden corners, its secret languages. My therapist (yes, therapists have therapists), wise and comforting, always with that little smile, told me that we can have relationships with anything, with everything—even the spaces we live in. I suppose she’s right, and I suppose I’m just beginning to understand what she means. I’ve always thought of relationships as these big, consuming things—people and pets, places that mark you, change you. But relationships with a home, with a light that finds you in a moment of quiet, with the creak of a door or the way the morning smells when it sneaks in through a cracked window… it’s all so unexpected, so surprising, this discovery of beauty in the mundane.
The unknown has always been a shadowy thing for me, something that whispers of loss and fear, something to avoid. We’re taught to be wary of what we don’t understand, aren’t we? But today, with that simple light on the wall, I was reminded that the unknown can be full of such potential, full of newness and warmth and things waiting to be discovered. How amazing, really, to think that there’s so much we haven’t yet experienced, so many moments of beauty that haven’t yet had the chance to visit us.
And this makes me think of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, with all its fragmented lines and layered meanings. People often say it’s a difficult poem, a bleak one, full of despair. But what draws me to it, what has always made it one of my favorites, is precisely that sense of the unknown that it carries. There’s always more to uncover, more to piece together, and just when you think you’ve grasped it, it slips away, showing you something new, something you hadn’t noticed before. The poem is like a conversation that never really ends, that keeps evolving, that reveals itself slowly, teasingly, only to hide again.
Life feels like that too, I suppose, if we let it. If we allow ourselves to be surprised, to be open to the unknown, to let beauty visit us in its own time, in its own way. Maybe that’s what I’m learning now, here in this house that is still a stranger to me, but also a friend I’m slowly getting to know. There is comfort in routine, in the familiar, but there is also a kind of thrilling joy in the surprise of the unknown, in the beauty that finds you when you least expect it.
I wonder if, in time, this house will start to feel more like home, if I’ll start to know its rhythms and moods as intimately as I know my own. Or maybe it will always be a little mysterious to me, always a little unknown. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s even beautiful.
5:02am August 14, 2024
This house, I think, is beginning to introduce itself to me, showing me its hidden corners, its secret languages. My therapist (yes, therapists have therapists), wise and comforting, always with that little smile, told me that we can have relationships with anything, with everything—even the spaces we live in. I suppose she’s right, and I suppose I’m just beginning to understand what she means. I’ve always thought of relationships as these big, consuming things—people and pets, places that mark you, change you. But relationships with a home, with a light that finds you in a moment of quiet, with the creak of a door or the way the morning smells when it sneaks in through a cracked window… it’s all so unexpected, so surprising, this discovery of beauty in the mundane.
The unknown has always been a shadowy thing for me, something that whispers of loss and fear, something to avoid. We’re taught to be wary of what we don’t understand, aren’t we? But today, with that simple light on the wall, I was reminded that the unknown can be full of such potential, full of newness and warmth and things waiting to be discovered. How amazing, really, to think that there’s so much we haven’t yet experienced, so many moments of beauty that haven’t yet had the chance to visit us.
And this makes me think of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, with all its fragmented lines and layered meanings. People often say it’s a difficult poem, a bleak one, full of despair. But what draws me to it, what has always made it one of my favorites, is precisely that sense of the unknown that it carries. There’s always more to uncover, more to piece together, and just when you think you’ve grasped it, it slips away, showing you something new, something you hadn’t noticed before. The poem is like a conversation that never really ends, that keeps evolving, that reveals itself slowly, teasingly, only to hide again.
Life feels like that too, I suppose, if we let it. If we allow ourselves to be surprised, to be open to the unknown, to let beauty visit us in its own time, in its own way. Maybe that’s what I’m learning now, here in this house that is still a stranger to me, but also a friend I’m slowly getting to know. There is comfort in routine, in the familiar, but there is also a kind of thrilling joy in the surprise of the unknown, in the beauty that finds you when you least expect it.
I wonder if, in time, this house will start to feel more like home, if I’ll start to know its rhythms and moods as intimately as I know my own. Or maybe it will always be a little mysterious to me, always a little unknown. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s even beautiful.
5:02am August 14, 2024