101. Beauty Hunting – Raven Roxanne
People say that beauty can come from the darkest places, but when you’re in a dark place, making something beautiful can feel impossible. How do you even start?
A few years ago, someone I loved was struggling with addiction, and I found myself reckoning with my own deeply ingrained pattern of codependency. It was a turning point in my life. People say that beauty can come from the darkest places, but when you’re in a dark place, making something beautiful can feel impossible. How do you even start?
I began with a simple practice of going into my studio, thinking about how I felt, and playing. I started with color, choosing ones that matched my emotional palette for the day. As I put paint to the surface, loosely weaving the colors together, I found myself somewhat unconsciously constructing a nest. Yes, I know—with a name like Raven, it seems too obvious. Yet the symbol of a nest has grown to mean so much to me through this process. It’s such a perfect representation of life—messy but beautiful. One painting turned into a series, then the series turned into a storybook for children.
Since then, other objects have taken on meaning and helped me in difficult moments. Just this morning, I came across a new one. I was out for a walk with my scruffy rescue pup, Willie, and I was feeling anxious and a little trapped. I’m an extrovert several months into quarantine, and as I wandered, I was actively asking myself, “Am I in a funk?” I kept on, avoiding the talking trap of the grey-haired man who sits on his porch smoking cigarettes.
I came to the white house with big white columns, the one with the overgrown front garden. I stopped to stare at the lily pond, flowers blooming from an old moss-covered fountain. I wanted to peek through the foliage; I wanted to magnify it, to spread it with two fingers like a static image on a screen, to get a glimpse inside the flowers.
At that moment, a man came down the stairs, and I burst out eagerly, “Excuse me, sir! Can I take a closer look at your fountain and flowers?” I could tell he wanted to say no, but he reluctantly agreed. I opened the hip-high iron gate, and Willie and I stepped into the garden. The lily, which burst from the thick water between leaves the size of watermelons, was so heavy it was leaning over. I bent down to take a closer look and I noticed the petals were like tissue paper, soft and pink, the light behind them revealing how delicate they were. The wiry yellow stamens looked like tentacles surrounding the stigma, like an inverted cone, so strangely flat. This shape probably inspired some sci-fi character, I thought to myself. I was taking it all in, getting lost in the flower, getting lost in thought, getting lost in myself.
It was then I noticed the feeling in my chest—the tightness, the feeling of being trapped, of maybe being depressed—had eased. It felt like I’d opened up.
– Raven Roxanne
Prompt:
Think about the last time you looked at something and noticed a change within—studying a painting, an animal, a flower, a piece of fruit, what you saw through a window. Write about what you saw, and what you felt shift.
You can repeat this practice of paying attention, noticing an object, and seeing what it helps you see—maybe daily for the rest of the week.
Alyssa Swart
Location: New York City, NY
About: This entry highlights how transportive objects can be, and it includes the fun dynamic between me and my brother.
Age: 32
Dylan and I entered my apartment together. He placed his suitcase in the far corner, wary of Chloe shedding near his clothes. He stood and reminded me that we’d have to get a toothbrush when we ventured out. I slyly nodded. He sauntered to my refrigerator to verify that all of his requests had been fulfilled – Noosa yogurts, Stumptown coffees, Pellegrinos. He chuckled at my coconut water and kombucha, playfully noting my youthful and urban brand of ridiculousness. He jokingly continued, shifting comic attention to the fact that the only other food in the refrigerator was dog food. I grew defensive, but have always found it difficult to argue with the truth, and yielded to the nature of the exchange, saying, “I get my nutrition from puppy kisses.”
He ventured over to my coffee table and started sifting through my piles of books and papers. I loved his unabashed interest in my things; it had a shameless, tactile quality rummaging through whatever orderly mess was displayed in my studio. His approach to entering an apartment was markedly different from mine – an inverted reflection – I attempted to disappear while he collected gazes and ballooned in the attention. I was usually so careful not to touch anything to the extent that it made everyone uncomfortable; most likely, I stood too close to a painting in a museum once, and a guard’s stern reprimand ricocheted into my stance, now manifesting each and every time I entered a room that was not my own. Dylan was the ricochet. So odd that two people who grew up in the same home had profoundly different ways of occupying a room.
He lifted A Naked Singularity, a book he bought me several birthdays ago, and asked if I had read it yet. I sheepishly shook my head no, but indicated that if it was on the table, I would read it soon. A sliver of paper fell to the ground, and I lifted it quickly to prepare for his gentle ribbing. He immediately asked, “What is it?”
“It’s a train ticket to DC from three years ago when I visited you and Vee,” I beamed.
He looked stunned by my expression.
He swallowed and said, “I don’t look at my own children with that much fondness.”
I felt my face involuntarily melt – flooded with tender memories of the restful train ride, reading to Vee before bed, the shared ice cream sitting like secrets held between us, holding hands along the sidewalk, explaining to her how the future would make her childhood seem antiquated, and the comfortable familiarity required for her to kick my leg so I would move over on the couch. I could see her laugh and my leaving. The ticket transported me. Then, the moment closed and left me wistful.
Dylan watched my wordless, animated time travel and stated, “You have a mindset of a hoarder without any of the stuff.”
I paused and considered, “I know, I’m so sentimental. I have to be careful.”
Gabriela Matei
Location: The Gambia
About: Wandering expat currently based in West Africa, working in international development, collecting moments and fridge magnets. Inspired by rare chilly rains, the heaviness of life as I observe it in a least-developed country and the risks the coronavirus pandemic is posing to the togetherness of this small world of ours.
Age: 37
These days, when I am not chasing all too familiar butterflies in complete awe, my gazing becomes green.
If someone had told me some years ago that one day I would find beauty in observing banana trees grow in my garden, with the sound of a most confident call to prayer in the background five times a day, in the smallest country in Africa, I would have definitely thought it impossible, at the very least because I never even liked bananas. The different lives I have layered up in the meantime proved anything is conceivable if one chooses to not live in fear and here I am today, in the midst of a global pandemic, staring at wannabe banana trees blossoming under monsoonal rains.
Without paying attention, I wouldn’t have noticed the bold protective arrogance of banana trees coming together, each growing another, and another, as if they disliked being alone. Or that new pure green leaves are somehow growing wrapped inside, before opening up from one day to the next, thriving with youthful energy and exuberance. Unusually sensitive to the lightest winds, even the largest self-assured leaves are beautifully shredded by every gust to the point it is difficult to imagine they would ever recover or survive. Could it be that water and sun are just enough for all red bananas, lady finger bananas, apple bananas, hardy bananas?
And then one day, it dawns on me that banana trees in my future lush garden grow even if I don't look at them. Strangely, this world of ours does not turn around an I.
Nicholas Jackson
Location: New Jersey
About: I am a librarian from New Jersey. He has come to poetry late, late when compared with others, but not as late as others. I am looking for inspiration.
Age: 37
I have not felt or noticed a change from within for sometime. As I have watched the pandemic rage and burn across the county and the world, my heart has gone into quaranienet. That is, isolation. I cannot recall the last time I looked at something and noticed a change within. I search my memory and I have memories of animals, flowers, fruit, or whatever I saw through the window. However, there is nothing. Nothing. Blank. A void. An empty pag.
Patrick McDonnell
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
About: the need to express my angst
Age: 68
We live in dangerous times
Any place you go, anyone you meet
Could be the end of your winning streak
Life is not normal, life is abnormal today
Way to go, one foot at a time to go away
How did we get here, I wonder, in our power
We thought we were immortal, now we cower
Behind our masks, our PPE, fighting an invisible
Enemy that knows no sleep, we are ‘Risible’
When will it end, where do we go, nowhere to hide
When our friends and family are carriers, to abide
Each other in our hour of greatest need no leader
Shows his or her face, we are left alone to beat her
This powerful enemy that seems to be everywhere
And yet nowhere, invisible, hideous, we need somewhere
Safe that will secour us, in our hour of need, bless us Lord
Because we have sinned, our fault at believing our sword
Was mightier than nature, and nature gave us back Covid -19
Sharon Clark
Location: Frederick, MD
About: I'll let the poem speak for itself. :)
Age: 44
Engrave it in Magenta
Scream it
Throw it down
All your hardest, deepest, thickest, words
Like: these chains have binded us together for ½ a lifetime
And: I will never be OK; I’ll end up like him and she’ll end up like me
Your judgments,
That which feels like it possesses you
Thick like you are running through the woods in a nightmare, unable to see, blinded by your own delusions
record it
engrave it in Magenta,
take that
you-think-you-own-me
I will sketch you in the brightest yellow, the cheeriest pink
Throw it down
And watch it
Become
Something
else