Grace and beauty flourish and grow around us.

Much of it is in contrast to pain and suffering and order, because well – if not – you lose the context of it all.

Clumsiness and ugliness compared to what?

Now you may have your head down about work or bad fortune or family, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

All there is to do is wake up.

Nearly everything around us is bordering on the impossible.

I mean, every breath sometimes feels like a miracle.

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek