Apricots, Pits, and Demanding Beauty
On finding beauty
“How can you talk of beauty,” asked bear, “when ugliness abounds?”
“How,” replied bird, “can we afford not to?”
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📷: Three Risenshine mobiles for a multicultural reading room in a new family-focused Portland development project serving BIPOC, immigrant and refugee households, and intergenerational families.
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When I look out the kitchen window, I see my neighbor’s roof. And their cars. And power lines. And a tired, mossy fence. And my dirty recycling bins.
The view is, to put it nicely, ugly.
When I was a kid, we had an apricot tree on the side of our house. My bedroom window looked out on it.
Each spring, that tree would explode in a riot of flowers. Silken white pedals with candy pink centers. Ivory anthers tipped in golden yellows. A universe contained within dark brown buds just waiting to erupt.
Come summer, its branches would be thick with an impossible weight of fruit.
And on those long, slow August days, I’d steal away with as many apricots I could load into my untucked t-shirt; sitting at the edge of the untamed spaces behind our home, hands sticky and sweet, hucking pits into the unknown.
I planted the apricot in front of my kitchen window with the goal of blocking the view of my neighbor’s house.
The tree, however, stands quiet and bare for many months each year, just like it was last week.
But now, its pencil-slim branches are each lined with a parade of blooms, fluttering in the wind like things alive. I can still see my neighbor’s house, but my focus has changed.
It’s a reminder to us, that – even in the ugliest of times, like now – beauty *can* coexist; but it requires, it demands.
Inaction is not a solution for beauty, for fruit, or for democracy. Pests and disease always seek the easiest target.
And so we must plant the seeds; we must feed and nurture the growth; we must protect; we and must fight, especially against those who would rip beauty, and value, and love from our soil.
Where will you find – and multiply – beauty today?
