Days of Beauty and Sorrow and Beaded Prayers

We walk in beauty, the Navajo say. Sunset pinks up the evening sky. A waning moon mottles the night clouds. On Facebook, a woman I've known since we were kids in grade school posts her most extraordinary photos of wild birds and fabulous sunrises on the river. I look out my window and see the rain has made confetti of our azaleas, knocking at least half the blooms down into bright, frilly piles on the grass. I'm waiting (once again! miraculously!) for my peonies to bloom. My neighbors—young couples, their helmeted kids on bikes, and dogs in all sizes—parade up and down the street on a fine day, wrapped in something that looks like joy. We walk in beauty.

A friend's brother has been hospitalized for weeks, having barely survived a house fire. He's doing better each day. The same friend took a spill at my house and badly hurt her foot on the same night another friend took a terrible spill in her kitchen as she was serving up a beautiful dinner. She bled rivers from her smashed nose and mouth. Another friend's spouse has cancer; another friend's husband just died, another has lost her father. In fact, I think, every time I look at social media, I feel like an elderly woman reading obituaries. Ha! I AM an old woman reading obituaries. We walk in beauty.

There are moments in my day when I forget I am a person with lung cancer. There are days when all I think about is lung cancer. And despite my dedication to brushing and flossing, my dentist says I have irreversible bone loss and will lose my teeth if I don't let the oral surgeon put some pig bone in my jaw. I tell her I have metastatic cancer and would rather use the surgery money to take a nice trip. She understands my choice. Europe will open back up eventually, and I'll go traipsing through the Pyrenees, dropping my teeth one by one along the camino as I go, like grotesque breadcrumbs. We walk in beauty.

At Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville (headquarters of Wal-Mart), Arkansas, they currently have a special exhibit of American crafts. In that special exhibit is a work by Sonya Clark called Beaded Prayers. It is made up of over five thousand small works of art collected over twenty years from people in thirty-five countries. Each participant writes a prayer on a small sheet of paper (two copies, actually) and makes two cloth packets to hold each copy of the prayer. The prayer is inserted into the packets, which are either beaded or tied closed. One packet travels with the exhibition; the twin goes home with the participant. I sat in that gallery surrounded by all the little prayers. It was like sitting in a chapel or a reliquary. I could feel the holiness around me, the beseeching and the gratitude, and I wept. 

We walk in beauty.