Necessary Beauty

On Fresh Flowers, Books, and the Science of Delight

Photo by me - I LOVE that this is within an hour’s drive!

In one of my first high school jobs, I worked for a florist. Glamourous, it was not. I spent a lot of time in a cramped upstairs office overflowing with overdue bills and piles of receipts, figuring out how to bring order to the chaos. The owner was a creator, not an organizer, for sure. But I loved the job. With occasional opportunities to work the register or tidy the displays in the shop, I had my fill of color and texture - the vibrancy of fresh flowers.

I didn’t know how to explain the draw back then. Other than prom time corsages and boutonnieres, I had never given much notice to anything floral. My California hometown’s attractive suburban landscapes featured more practical, drought-tolerant shades of green than exuberant layers of color.

But as I grew older and moved to more four-season environments, spring blossoms like tulips and daffodils, followed by peonies, zinnias, lavender, sunflowers, lilies, and a late summer/fall profusion of dahlias, captivated me. Although gardening isn’t really in my wheelhouse, I yearn to be surrounded by fresh flowers. Why not?

Apparently, I am gardener enough to have planted these in the right place :)

And I’m lucky to live 15 minutes from THIS!

Novelist Toni Morrison said, “I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don't think it's a privilege or an indulgence, it's not even a quest. I think it's almost like knowledge, which is to say, it's what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating and then representing beauty is what humans do.” (Paris Review podcast, 2019 from a 1993 interview)

Our humanity draws us to things that enrich and enable our lives. Lovely things, practical things, uplifting things, things that we somehow need. So we search them out, include them in our experience, and then, when our creative instincts get going, figure out how to include them in our expression of ourselves to the world.

Beauty, in whatever forms speak to you, is worth pursuing, enjoying, and sharing.

Time and attention given to discovering what delivers necessary beauty wakes us up to the science of delight, where surprise meets joy. So say authors Ross Gay (who’s also a poet) and Sophie Blackall (who’s also an illustrator, and maybe a poet as well). His The Book of Delights and her Things to Look Forward To take a collector’s approach to finding beautiful magic in moments of wonder, splendor, peace, and purpose. They see it in bakeries and random hellos, mistakes, rain, insects, songs, special treatment, babies, aging, museums, accepting, tidying, doing something for someone else, birds…

Imagine your own endless list of encounters with delight. You could build it by keeping a journal (Gay’s original plan was an observational essay a day for a month), or putting together a calendar (Blackall cataloged 52 weeks, for a year’s worth of “large and small joys”) You could capture it in art or music or post-its.

I gather fresh flowers, in vases, gardens, photos, memories. And, in line with author Gretchen Rubin (Life in Five Senses), I practice tuning into all my senses to seek out what delights. I collect books, travel experiences, tastes (chocolate, bread, guacamole), the sounds of family conversation. What Magic? exists as a place to document the wonder, inspirations, and ideas I find. I consider them my necessities. And regardless of whether or not they have meaning for you, all are beautiful in their way.

As Toni Morrison observes, “The startle and the wonder of being in this place. This overwhelming beauty—some of it is natural, some of it is man-made, some of it is casual, some of it is a mere glance—is an absolute necessity. I don't think we can do without it any more than we can do without dreams or oxygen."

What are your absolute and beautiful necessities?

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Whee! Embrace the magic!!