Song lyrics make up a majority of my blog post titles. The title for this post comes from one of my favorite Annie Lennox songs, A THOUSAND BEAUTIFUL THINGS. I’ve quoted it before in this previous post. And this one, too.
The lyric is: Every day I write the list of reasons why I still believe they do exist; a thousand beautiful things.
Beautiful things are important in this world and even more important to acknowledge on a daily basis. While it’s important to stop and smell the roses, it’s just as important to acknowledge the beauty of the rose itself. Beauty is a balm, a calm shot of positivity in an increasingly (it seems to me) negative world.
This post was inspired (if not required!) to be written by an unfortunate Facebook event yesterday. I was scrolling through the usual vacation selfies, cat memes, and birthday/baby/wedding announcements and happened upon a video that had been commented on by a peripheral friend. Facebook has changed so that now when scrolling through the feed you don’t need to click play on a video to have it play, it does so automatically.
First of all, I didn’t have my glasses on, so I couldn’t see exactly what was in the frame. Then I put my glasses on and the next three seconds I saw a man in an alley beating a white cat with a baseball bat until it was dead. In the beginning the cat actually tried to fight back. Dear God, it was horrific. I scrolled down to the comments and the few I read were all political about how arabs were such a violent people and blah blah blah. Somehow a nightmare video of one man savagely killing a cat, which was bad enough, morphed into a disgusting hate diatribe directed at women, religion, animals, God and everything in between.
It was difficult to fall asleep last night as that video kept replaying against my closed eyelids. I tossed. I turned. And it was still there, like a silent nightmare when I wasn’t dreaming. To combat it I began to list off the things in my life that I am grateful for, things that I acknowledge as beautiful; My daughter, my GRAND daughter, my family, G, twin embryos happily gestating (not mine), my cat Carlos, Summerland, my boss, my health, the beach, and on and on until I fell asleep counting my blessings (another song lyric).
This morning I woke up and thought, okay enough. Enough Facebook-feed crap. Enough front page news. Enough allowing myself to be subjected to the very things that give me anxiety, subdue happiness, and eclipse beauty; tornadoes, earthquakes, toxic drinking water, drought, plane crashes, melting ice caps, drones, fracking, Fukushima, tsunamis, etc.
Enough.
So, I think I’ll hang out on my blog for a while, create some more of the Thousand Beautiful Things and put them out into cyber world to help balance out the damaging, cat killing nightmares.
Things like this:
and this:
and this:
Peace out.