My partner is undergoing chemotherapy for an aggressive breast cancer. I still come up short of breath when saying those words. And I am reluctant to bring this part of my personal life into this blog. Yet, every bone and nerve in my body says that--to be an honest writer--I need to be there 100% with my whole being. Avoiding my daily and hourly participation in her diagnosis and care would be a sham.

Nausea, fatigue and moodiness are our roommates. We live with contradictory partners: hope and poison. Where does stamina come from? What about grace? Pure will. Steel thread, Steel cable. Girder. Thin strand again.

Our survivor friend finds her power as researcher. My partner ignores all scientific reports, medical journals and pilots her small ship by attending to what is in front of her each hour. Each day. Each minute of each hour of each day.

I am the chart reader, forecast receiver. I catalogue everything but do not share unless asked. Forever processing—a feeble microchip. Calculating, relaying, paraphrasing, converting to plain speech the most convoluted and contradicting.

No, I am the ballast. Below decks. Storm-tossed and coming back to center again and again. 

 Today I started to prepare for my fall semester classes. I browsed a file of images I’ve collected over the years, hoping to find a few to use in my critical thinking class (with first semester college students).
 
I was simultaneously thinking about my latest project (THE BEAUTY PROJECT), a collection of ideas about beauty from people of all walks of life and from all cultural traditions. And, then I found these two images and I thought: “Are either of these beautiful?” “How might we talk about each of them or about them together as a diptych?”
They were taken at the time of the 2015 uprising in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray and in 2016 during a Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge.
 
It was, as artist Makato Fujimura proposes, “a generative moment,” a moment when a still, small urging arises from who knows where—exactly—but from somewhere nonetheless, a moment that asked for something from me and that received my longings. It is a risky moment to talk about publically. Because the idea of beauty is problematic—it points us to relativism, to distasteful and damaging impulses as well as to deep connectivity and caring. Fujimura links generative thinking and attention to beauty to something he calls “Culture Care,” a care for the world and all its sources of beauty and strife, a call to make culture inhabitable.
 
            Culture Care ultimately results in a generative cultural environment:
            open to questions of meaning, reaching beyond mere survival, inspiring
            people to meaningful action, and leading toward wholeness and harmony.
            It produces thriving cross-generational community. To make culture            
            inhabitable, to make it a place of nurture for creativity, we must all choose
            to give away beauty gratuitously. “Gratuitous” can be a negative word, as in            
           “gratuitous violence,” but here I am using it to speak of intentionality, and
            even forcefulness, which, as we will see in later chapters, is necessary in
            our deeply fragmented culture. I will also be looking at how the reality of            
            beauty can help integrate such fragmentation.
 
And so, I propose my question again: “Are either of these images beautiful?” If you are inspired to comment here, please also consider adding your name to the growing, world-wide list of BEAUTY PROJECT contributors. You can do that here on this blog-page. Please rest assured that I will never share our e-mail address with any third party. It will be used only by me to send you quarterly updates.

Wheaton College professor, Clyde S. Kirby, distributed his “Eleven Resolutions to Guide Life” to his students at the start of each term. Resolution #7 begins with this sentence, I shall open my eyes and ears….and it continues: Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic” existence.
 
As I read this again today, I am reminded of 2008, the year the great recession hit, when one of my sons, a recent art school graduate, said, “Somewhere along the line beauty became a cop-out, a word synonymous with vacancy.” He jolted me, a punch to my gut…my gorgeous, soulful son uttered those sad words. That very day I started an inquiry whose goal was to collect other thoughts about the big idea of beauty. I called it “The Beauty Project.” Contributors run the gamut: poets, artists, plumbers, doctors, etc. You can check out the comments here.
 
After a long hiatus, amidst so much ugliness, it seems now a good time to reinstate “The Beauty Project.” I invite you to share your thoughts by visiting my website and adding your comments to this blog post.
 
I will collect comments periodically and will post updates via my site, Facebook & Twitter. Additionally, you will see a place on the blog page for you to add your e-mail address. By adding your e-mail, you’ll receive occasional updates and reading/listening/viewing suggestions gleaned from The Beauty Project’s database. You can trust that I will never share your address with third parties of any kind.
 
And, please pass the link to your friends, neighbors, colleagues. Let’s widen the circle.
 

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