To Whom Are We Beautiful?

Weekly wisdom to bring you home in two minutes.

A SHORT STORY

The cherry blossoms are in bloom in New York City, which has me thinking a lot about rebirth.

This past weekend, Anastasiia’s mom was sharing with me the Ukrainian rituals that surround Easter, and how it is more about remembrance than anything else. She told me how, after her father’s death, she felt comforted by the ritual as a way to remember him.

“I was angry at God,” she told me. But “slowly, through the ritual, I realized how much he was still with me.”

Her story prompted me to share a line from a poem I have been thinking about a lot over the past week, from David Ignatow:

I wish I knew the beauty of leaves falling.
To whom are we beautiful as we go?

It’s such an incredible question. It somehow gives one’s own disappearance and death another form of purpose, that there might be other eyes seeing a certain beauty in your going.

I think of my mom in that way, and how her love has become more beautiful and closer to me in her passing.

And even more so, how in those two lines, the whole mystery of the universe seems to live.

A POEM

“Three in Transition” by David Ignatow

I wish I understood the beauty
in leaves falling. To whom
are we beautiful
as we go?

I lie in the field
still, absorbing the stars
and silently throwing off
their presence. Silently
I breathe and die
by turns.

He was ripe
and fell to the ground
from a bough
out where the wind
is free
of the branches

Grateful,

Michael