My great-grandmother crossed an ocean and spent her old age in our cramped house in Kankakee, holding court in French while my grandmother translated.
"There are only two things in this world that can pierce the human heart. Beauty and affliction. And the world is full of beauty — so beauty is the antidote to affliction."
She would list the things she found beautiful. Flowers pushing through cracks in the sidewalk. The sound of rain on a roof. The way a bird's wing catches the light.
I was in college before I learned she had been teaching us Simone Weil. My mother lived it. In a rainstorm she would take us all outside barefoot to splash in the gutters, singing over the thunder. I asked her once whether we would catch cold. She spun in a puddle like a child and called back: "It's worth it."
Noticing beauty on purpose is not a luxury. For a wounded heart it is medicine.
Michael J. Menard - from Greater Than Gravity