The Healing Power of Beauty Recovery is a lifelong process.  We heal one layer of sorrow, resentment, and fear, then a deeper layer begs for attention.  At times, it feels exhausting. What keeps us going when our longing overwhelm us? There is no one answer, of course.  We need many tools, but one of those tools is the experience and the creation of beauty. Our souls crave beauty.  The waving of a vine in the wind, the cerulean blue of the sky just as the sun sets, music, poetry, the softness of a baby’s cheek, the caress of the breeze.  Beauty throbs in all moments, if we can only see…

Life can be tough when we don’t think there’s a point to it all. As a teenager, I was fond of Existentialism and its dreary view of human nature. I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit multiple times and used it, and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” as inspirations for somber plays of my own. Unfortunately, I lacked the sense of humor that saved their writing. At the time, I considered myself to be a suffering artist, and I didn’t have the perspective that would let me laugh at myself. That was forty years ago. Now the memory of Sartre and Beckett is dim. Life no longer seems pointless, nor do…

As a gift to myself, I sat, for almost two hours, at a picnic table on Mt. Tabor, doing nothing. Douglas fir trees encircled me; dappled shade fell on the path and the field where small, white daisies bloomed amid the grass. The air was soft and warm, smelling of trees, and the lilt of birdsong spread across the canopy. I watched in awe, relished the breeze on my skin, and listened with gratitude. Because I sat still, birds came close. I could see the flick of color around the robin’s eye and the grey shading on the junco’s neck. “Click, click,” said the junco, and flew off, but the…