beautiful places

and the calm of awe

Some days I wake with anxiety, even before I read the headlines, before I become aware of the car horns or the room-shaking construction. On these days, I do what I can to keep things moving, finishing the work as well as I can, attempting to claw back my sanity wherever possible. How can I let go of this heaviness in my chest?

For a while, my solution has been to find beauty wherever I can. When I let myself fully engage in something beautiful, my body seems to reset: the temperature comes down, I breathe easy, I forget about thinking.

I've been lucky to have only lived my adult life in beautiful cities. I spent five years in San Francisco, where the fog blankets the shining sea, the lush hills. Every sunset was among the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. I was a few blocks away from a park that was verdant year-round, I was a thirty minute walk from the Bay, a thirty minute walk from a waterfall, a thirty minute walk from a park filled with happy dogs and a perfect view of the skyline.

New York City is beautiful, but in a completely different way. The city drips with something — maybe history or memories. The past seems to ooze out of the walls of the subways, the old brick buildings, the murals of icons of the past. The beauty of this city commands respect, put together by hands long gone, even as their fingerprints remain everywhere.

I think about how the Aztecs settled in the ruins of the ancient city of Teotihuacan. They worshipped the pyramids left there, revered them as the place where time itself began. They came to regard the builders of the city, the Toltecs, as the originators of all culture. It feels like a natural reaction to awe at what came before. Even if the Aztecs knew much less about their predecessors than we do now, I share some of their reverence for the builders of our environments.

After decades of movies and TV showing this city, doesn't it exude the same sort of mythical quality? The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building still feel more beautiful to me than anything that was built in the 90 years since they were constructed, each of the major bridges have stood for at least a half a century, the subway has been running since 1904. There is the myth created by decades of culture, and there is the authentic grandeur that exists in this city and many more. It never ceases to be impressive what humans are capable of creating and sustaining.

On a day when my stomach churns for no reason, I appreciate the vintage clock at the barbershop. I walk a block in the wrong direction while adjusting my umbrella and enjoy how different each neighborhood feels. When we go to Transmitter Park and walk down the pier, skyscrapers poke against a gray blanket of clouds. Some are new, others have weathered thousands of storms. Flashes of light illuminate the dimming sky, umbrellas become percussion, and we're laughing and running and screaming to the closest restaurant that will save us from the rain.

The sky darkens, the buildings disappear, the clouds roar until they don't. When it's light again, we head to the station to go our separate ways. The buildings are visible over our shoulders again. As I fly through the tunnels again, I notice that I haven't felt anxious in hours. And the skyline gleams in the night.

---

---

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - God Does Like Ugly by JID - Atlanta’s finest

• POEM - “The Poet at Seven” by Donald Justice - he would spin around
  Faster and faster till the drunken ground / Rose up to meet him