Hearts Vulnerable to Beauty and Pain

By Anna Blaedel

I have a little notebook I received from a local Bhuddist eco-grief chaplain. On the cover, screen printed in blue ink, are the words “Choose Joy.” Every day since January 20, I have noted some encounter with joy, some moment in which life’s beauty opens me, is revealed to me.

My entry from February 10: I awoke to a poem waiting, sent by a beloved friend. The poem is by Tim Eddy.

“I would like to thank God
for:
Cyan and Cerulean,
Arctic and Azure,
Teal and Turquoise,
for the ever varying light of the sky
and for the infinite ocean hues.
I only asked for Blue.”

I have been slowly reading my way through a book I encountered unexpectedly in eighth grade, on a shelf in my public school library in Iowa. Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence. At the time I was struggling, and felt very much alone. Queer, trans, desperate, scared, not yet with language for any of the deep, wild, internal waters I was trying to navigate, and stay afloat in. Not yet practiced in the sacred realities of trans&queer joy. The book was balm, buoy, nourishment. (It is likely now banned, or under threat of it.) I remember thinking, at first glance, it was a book about being blue, down, depressed. I discovered, instead, it was a book about being gay. In the title short story, by Bruce Coville, a young queer kid – bullied, harassed, terrorized, alone – meets his fairy godfather. One of three wishes granted by the fairy godfather is the “gay fantasy” of every queer person turning blue for the day, an antidote to aloneness. The wish, come true, reveals not only a single shade of blue, but an enticing multiplicity of hues. From the faintest arctic glimmer to a brilliant cerulean, the world is remade by signs of withness, possibilities for togetherness, in sharedness and difference, openings into solidarity far more vast than desperation for “only blue” could have imagined. 

Thanks be, for when we ask only for blue, and get azure, turquoise, cyan. Thanks be, for so many ways into connection, so many strategies for finding each other, so many possibilities for beauty, revealed.

Autumn Brown, in conversation with her sister adrienne maree brown, talks about the practice of living a good life during hard times. Freedom fighters like Harriet Tubman and James Baldwin, they suggest, are those making a life of freedom and creativity, inside a hard time.

I remember words a beloved mentor, Odette, spoke each week as a benediction 20 years ago: “May our hearts be vulnerable to beauty, and to the pain of each other.”

We are inside a very hard time. Escalating authoritarianism, hellbent on suppressing dissent and sowing fear. ICE arrests, illegal detentions, immoral deportations. Assaults on due process, let alone our kinship bonds and shared belonging. Living together, well, calls us to be vulnerable to the pain of each other. Venezuelans, disappeared to El Salvador, via an act used to imprison Japanese Americans during World War II. Project Esther, a Christian Zionist vision of right-wing politicians, part of Project 2025, aimed at suppressing movements for Palestinian solidarity, and equating calls for liberation with antisemitism, while furthering Christian hegemony and making the world even less safe for Jews. 

Hamdan Ballal, co-director of the Oscar-winning Palestinian documentary “No Other Land,” beaten by Israeli settlers, abducted by the Israeli military. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts PhD student from Turkey, abducted by masked, plainclothes police in Massachusetts, as she returned home from breaking her Ramadan fast. Badar Khan Suri, an Indian citizen studying and teaching conflict studies and peace processes at Georgetown, abducted, too. Mahmoud Khalil, a grad student at Columbia, known for his care, compassion, courage, and capacity for mediating, disappeared by agents of the state, enabled by university administrators. 

It is a hard time, raw with pain. It is also a thin time, calling us to be vulnerable to beauty, too. We are in the spring equinox, Ostara, a rebalancing of light and dark. Soon, the Shawwal moon will usher in Eid al-Fitr, signaling the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Passover Haggadahs are being readied, for telling and foretelling freedom from bondage, release from narrow places of constriction and fear. Lenten practices of attunement and atonement foreshadow the Easter season, in which the power of life – the possibilities of sacred aliveness – are honored, remembered, tapped into.

“I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear,” Mahmoud Khalil bears witness, from a detention cell. Practicing life in a devastatingly hard time. Prentis Hemphill talks about healing as a non-linear process, a posture, a way of being with the world and what happens to us. Within and through very real ruptures, trauma, pain, orienting our practices and rituals and encounters around healing, repair, and transformation.

In the little corner of the world in which I live, the first numbs of rhubarb began poking out of the ground this week. I noted their emergence in my journal. Day after day, in a state heavy with hatred and fear, I encounter people and the earth practicing liberation, survival, joy.

We make a life of freedom by staying vulnerable to beauty inside a time hardened by pain. Every crocus bulb, in bloom. Every day, opening into encounters with joy. Every time we ask only for blue, and encounter the varying light of the sky, the infinite ocean hues. Every act of courageous noncompliance, and creative resistance. Every time we defy or refuse hatred and fear, we practice liberation.

Olivia Fern sings a song, another benediction I am carrying close these days: “May you know in your bones that this earth is your home. May you feel in your soul you are worthy and whole. May you know in your bones that this earth is your home. May you feel that you belong.” May your belonging, our belonging, fuel the fight for shared belonging, until earthly belonging is without exception.

May it be so. May we practice it, until it is so.