An Ordinary Day

November 1 is something of a personal anniversary to me. It’s the day in 1976 when I walked out of the house we’d recently moved into in Albany, Oregon, to meet the schoolbus. We lived on the outskirts of town. Across the street from us was a farm field that now lay fallow. A low fog hung everywhere and the field was covered in frost. A spider had built a web between the post and crosspiece of our mailbox and it was encrusted with frost. The beauty of it heartened me. I thought, “It’s going to be okay.” Surely it would be okay, if beauty like this could be had for free on an otherwise ordinary morning.

I’m sure you’re picking up on the fact that, at the time, I understood the existence of beauty to be a cause and effect thing: the fact of beauty’s existence meant good things would happen. Forty-seven years later, I have a different understanding. Beauty simply is, and at that long-ago moment, I was helped by the comfort beauty gave me. But it didn’t change the reality of life, the fact that life comes together and falls apart, comes together and falls apart, on and on.

I love that I was a fifteen-year-old whose gaze could be lifted out of her own suffering by beauty.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, something unusual happened next, in this moment, as I wrote this. I had the idea to imagine that fifteen-year-old me in Israel, then in Gaza. Let’s suppose for a moment that she can find beauty, even in the midst of terror and destruction. Perhaps some quality of afternoon sunlight angles through the window and she is struck by it, how it warms the room with its buttery glow. For just that second, she is in a pure moment with beauty.

It’s pretty clear, though, that that moment is not a promise. Her ability to appreciate beauty changes nothing of the circumstances of her world. Things will not be okay just because she can perceive the beauty that’s there. Beauty helps, helps us, helps me, to carry on. But it’s only humans who can change the suffering we’ve created. The only “promise” that exists is in the hands of those in power, should they choose to take it.

I hope they choose their children. For me, forty-seven years ago, things did get better – and then they didn’t, and then they did again, and so on. I’ve had the privilege of a fairly ordinary life. I want that for the children of Gaza and Israel, too – if it’s not already too late. I want them to be able to walk out on a school day and just have the ordinary fears that go along with being a human kid in a school; I want them to see whatever their equivalent of my spiderweb would be to them – an olive tree or a flamingo flower. I want something lovely to have the power to make them feel better and carry them through their ordinary day.