Recognize the Beauty; Be the Help

Ruby Falls is a song by Guster that’s been out for 19 years. I really started to enjoy the song in the last year, but it wasn’t until last week that I heard the lyrics in a different way. 

Tonight
Where do we go from here?
The road to Ruby Falls has reached the end
And now we're digging in the sand
They're promising that help is on the way  


With five days of doomscrolling wildfire coverage under my belt, that song suddenly made perfect sense in a totally new way. 

Crow tracks in the snow form a circle where the bird hopped around looking for food.

I love that about art. How it changes, shifts like a chameleon, from person to person and throughout life. 

I’d spoken with a friend of mine from LA who was safe, whose belongings were untouched by fire, but who knew so many people who had lost everything. She was at a loss about what to say. It all seemed impossible. She was so sorry. She confessed that she felt so bad that she wasn’t going through exactly what they were going through.

Love, confession number one
Impossible and sorry

Footprint trails in the snow, and windblown ripples of snow and ice on the ground.

The rhetoric on social media, that somehow people deserved what was happening to them because of how the state of California voted, because of the amount of money they’ve made in their lives.

And judge, can you look the other way?
Some things are best unsaid

Songs don’t mean the same thing for any two people. Paintings carry different weight based on experience and life. Photographs make mothers cry. 

Art grows and changes depending on what you’re going through, moves and breathes with you through life, like a bird on the wind.    

Show me a different part of life that moves with you in the same way. Before and after tragedy, or milestone, or life change. 

A blue sky backs an ice-covered tree. Each twig and branch is crystallized.

And now where can we go from here
When all the morning birds have gone away
Two wrongs won't navigate tonight
The afterlife is all in the end
The afterlife is ours in the end

You can’t take any of it with you. But when you’re still here and all your things are gone, the life you’ve built is ash and dust…

A mundane photo of a simple part of life suddenly feels like everything when a fire sweeps through and takes everything familiar. 

Ice-encased leaves and branches of a bush, with the sun sparkling behind them.

The beauty was always there. It’s your perspective that changes, that gives you the ability to appreciate it. 

The real key is to recognize the beauty before something dramatically shifts your perspective. 

That, and to help others who have had their perspective altered dramatically. Find kindness and be the help.

Long tree shadows and footprints in snow.
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