19 Things That Are Still Beautiful

Let's not talk about the election just yet

First, let’s just get this out of the way: This week FUCKING SUCKS. 

Second, start this piece by watching this Onion video, and particularly dwell on this surprisingly comforting final line: “But what we can do is we can actually zoom out here…out of the solar system to the edges of our cosmos, where we see ultimately how meaningless this whole race really is and how insignificant all of our tiny little lives really are.”

Third, read this poem by Anne Boyer and again, contemplate this final line, “look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t!”

Fourth, consider the below collage a sort of map to find beauty in your own life. Perhaps this is avoidant behavior. And perhaps I don’t fucking care.

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19 Things That Are Still Beautiful

1. Underwater Pumpkin Carving: Last weekend, one of my dive instructors held an underwater pumpkin carving contest at his house, which sits at the edge of Palisade overlooking a small lake.
   
   He brought the pumpkins, we—the students—brought our wetsuits and dive gear. Only a handful of us braved the 60-degree lake—at which time I learned that a 3mm wetsuit is barely warm enough for those kinds of temperatures—while the others, too scared of a little cold lake water, carved their pumpkins blindfolded to even the playing field. I finished my pumpkin quickly (too quickly perhaps—it came in second to last place in the contest) and swam three chilly laps around the glassy lake, paddling my flippers and sucking air down through my snorkel.
   
   I thought of British writer Roger Deakin who wrote a book (and inspired a whole movement) on this kind of wild swimming, starting with a swim in a ditch in his yard, and I also recalled that it was a quote from a poem in the opening to that book that inspired me to start The Third Thing. I crawled out of the lake craving more bone-chilling wild swims.

   

2. Learning to Barrel Race: My horse-riding instructor (who coincidentally also happens to belong to this little Grand Junction diving community) recently picked up a set of popup barrels and is graciously teaching me and a horse named Jolene how to ride around them.
   
   I’ve watched some barrel racing on YouTube and have to admit I had no idea how much skill went into the event. Jolene is learning how to make the turns around the barrels, I’m learning how best to tell her to take those turns using the only common language we share—which is the language of our moving bodies.
   
   I turn my hips, she turns hers. I squeeze her belly with the side of my thigh, she squeezes tighter in the turn. Together we draw figure eights around the barrels and race back down the straightaway.
   
   I have never felt more unencumbered.

   

3. Soup Season Arrives: As the queen of soup, I declare that soup season has begun. Not only because the time has changed and the darkness settles over us with a swiftness that is utterly breathtaking, but also because I can feel it in my bones that it is time. The old soup gods are speaking through me.
   
   May you create powerful broths to wayleigh your foes, and forge heavy soup spoons from the blood of your enemies.

   

4. First Snow in the Desert: On the most mundane errand—the drive to the grocery store to pick up milk—I saw the Book Cliffs and the Grand Mesa finally dusted with snow. Towering several thousand feet above the valley, they can hold a dusting even when the town is a balmy 60 degrees.
   
   The contrast broke me. I thought about pulling off to the side of the road to cry. It was that beautiful.
   
   Tonight, on my way to the gym, I stepped outside for the first time all day and saw that it was snowing—right here in the desert—the biggest, fattest flakes in an unpredicted flurry. The snow only lasted an hour. Maybe less. And it melted even faster. But I’ve already poured a mug of hot chocolate and have settled beneath a wool blanket for the night.

   

5. Sweating it Out: My gym has an infrared sauna free to use by any of its members. I’m a big believer that nearly any ailment can be cured by sweating it out (especially emotional ailments) and so took myself and an audiobook into the 140-degree wooden box for an hour to detox all the shit I’ve been carrying around lately. And wouldn’t you know, I left many of my gripes and worries in a puddle of sweat on the sauna floor. At least for a little while.

   

6. Kickboxing: I am learning how to (professionally) punch and kick the shit out of things in a new class. I bought boxing gloves with roses on them as well as hot pink wrist wraps. I get a rush from the smack sound my body makes against the instructor’s pads when I hit them at just the right force and angle. Bruises are ballooning on the tops of my feet and the sides of my calves because I am not kicking correctly. Still, I am proud of those bruises.
   
   My instructor tells me to loosen up if I want to hit harder. Drop the shoulders. Flex the hips. Move those feet. Sometimes we all need a safe space to be unabashedly violent.

   

7. Freediving Class: I don’t know if I want to get good at freediving but I do like spending a couple hours in the pool every week playing around underwater.
   
   Last week we played underwater hockey and, not to brag, I scored two goals for my team. Which is to say, I was good at it. I could swim fast and hold my breath for a surprisingly long time. I scraped the tops of my hands so many times on the bottom of the pool, I am still nursing a fist full of knuckles missing huge chunks of flesh.
   
   Most nights this week I have dreamt of breathing underwater.

   

8. Breath Holds: Part of the freediving class requires doing regular exercises to learn to hold your breath. Our instructor predicts if we do these exercises every week, we will be able to hold our breath for at least three minutes by the end of class. I am practicing, but I am not very good. Many things influence how long I can hold my breath. (Did I work out within the last 12 hours? How much sleep have I had? How stressful are other aspects of my life?).
   
   I’m approaching a two-minute breath hold which feels like progress, though several students are surpassing me with ease. My chest begins to burn around 45 seconds and I fight the urge to swallow which makes the compulsion to gasp that much harder to suppress. At a minute and a half, I start wiggling around and pawing at my chest even though that means I’m using muscles and wasting oxygen. I can’t help it. By one minute and 45 seconds, I’m spent. Gasping.
   
   I’m learning to let the chest contractions come. They eventually pass. The body can learn to tolerate more CO2 so long as you train it slowly. You can learn to delay distress.

   

9. Chai > Coffee: One day this summer, I awoke and did not want my usual cup of coffee. This was odd. I’ve made myself a cup of coffee every morning for the better part of a decade. Even when I ditched caffeine back in 2021, I still made a freshly ground cup of decaf every day.  All at once, I lost my taste for it.
   
   I switched to chai.
   
   Making a proper cup of chai is slower and more labor-intensive than making a cup of coffee, but I’m starting to enjoy the drawn-out 15-minute process. First, I tip three teaspoons of Kolkata chai blend into a small pot; add two teaspoons of cut and sliced dried ginger; and cover it all with a cup of water. The electric stove takes ages to get the water to a simmer, so I use that time to clean the kitchen. What’s amazing is that a kitchen can actually be cleaned in 15 minutes, sometimes less, a chore I regularly assumed would take an hour or more.
   
   After a three-minute simmer, I add a cup of milk and a little honey. Another three minutes of brew time and I strain the whole thing into a ceramic mug. Then I beg the clock to never reach 9am as I sit in the predawn dark on the couch in my soft pajamas sipping a drink that took a quarter of an hour to make.

   

10. A Stack of New (to me) Books:
    This is my most recent order and the prices when you buy used:
    - She Flies Without Wings: How Horses Touch a Woman's Soul: $4.99
    - The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky: $7.89
    - Labyrinths: $8.09
    - Bluets: $10.29
    - Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good: $16.64
    - Little Weirds: $8.29
    - Desert Oracle: Volume 1: Strange True Tales from the American Southwest: $16.39
    - The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain: $15.74
    - The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth: $21.99

    

11. Dressing in All Fleece: As your benevolent queen of soup, I believe I also wield the power to announce proper soup attire which at the moment consists of this pair of fleece pants (65% off right now) and this fleece zip-up sweater (not on sale, but completely worth the price).
    
    Please dress appropriately for your soup-ening.

    

12. Soft Light for Dark Nights: Are the days getting darker? Yes! Physically and metaphorically? Also, yes!
    
    As someone who vehemently hates the “big light,” I’ve been playing around with moving about the house in the evenings with candlelight. It’s not easy to do 100% of the time—and it’s a little pricey if you believe paraffin wax will give you cancer and so exclusively burn expensive beeswax candles—but it does change the mood of the space and also the mood of the body into something calmer and deeper and more grounded.
    
    Someone, please alert me when I can light the screen of my laptop with flame.

    

13. Booking Future Trips While Luxuriating in Being Home: Oh the sweet pleasure of a calendar jam-packed with adventure. But, oh! The sweet pleasure of lounging at home in my fleece-suit. My two loves, they bicker.
    
    I plan adventures during fleece-suit times, and remind myself that the fleece-suit will still be there waiting for me during dense adventure times.
    
    Travel is slowing down for the winter and I have four months to soak in all the home-body goodness of being cozy and local before I take off again. It is time to plan how best to break the fleece-days come spring.
    
    A dive trip to the Bahamas is already booked. But what about riding horses across Iceland? Or a raft trip through Utah? And I can’t forget freediving with whale sharks off of Papua New Guinea.
    
    Let the calendar-ing (and bank account draining) begin!

    

14. Planning Thanksgiving: Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I know that it is technically a holiday built on the bodies of broken promises, but I hope you will allow me to sidestep that if just for a moment and tell you what it means to me, in a context that is purely of right now.
    
    I made a rule a few years back that I do not travel on the major holidays (meaning, for me, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years). I do not like airports. I do not like crowds. I do not like screaming, fussy children. I especially do not like all of those things smashed together with punitive pricing to ice the cake. So I do not travel at these times.
    
    I do however like a celebration and seeing my dear friends cozied up into one tiny kitchen together. I like a spread of food made thoughtfully. I like to draw out a gathering into a long day of sips and nibbles and giggles. This is what Thanksgiving is to me—a day to say “Food! We love your nourishment and tastiness! Friends! We love your presence and abundance of hugs and kind words!” And so it is my favorite holiday that I take great strides to celebrate every year.
    
    And let me be SO CLEAR that I am not speaking about “Friendsgiving,” a term I loathe for the way it minimizes the experience, as if to say a real Thanksgiving cannot take place between unrelated adults who love each other. (Why should its legitimacy be staked on taking place between relatives who may have extreme contempt for one another?)
    
    Friendsgiving is what you host in college when you’re not yet certain how to make mashed potatoes but you want to play at making mashed potatoes. Friendsgiving is the Little Tikes plastic playhouse. Thanksgiving is the brick-and-mortar home.
    
    So I am planning Thanksgiving with a group of dear friends. I am already dreaming up the dishes and drinks that will carry us through the day and ultimately, hopefully, remind us that we are not so alone.

    

15. Wintering: Writer Katherine May brought the idea of wintering to my attention back in that dark pandemic winter of late 2020. I read her book (Wintering) from the bathtub with the candles lit while I waited out the Pacific Northwest downpours. May helped me see that the body should not be made to endure the same schedule, every day, every month, every year but rather adjust seasonally (whether that’s literally seasonally or emotionally seasonally).
    
    It’s easiest for me to think about wintering literally, and so I do. Winter, even in the desert, is upon us. And so I must shift with the season. This looks like many things: Cold swims, hot baths, embracing darkness—many of the items contained within this list. But also new things I should perhaps consider now that I am wintering in a new location—new trails to hike at dusk, new spaces to take in the dark, new foods to nibble.
    
    “Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

    

16. Ditching Social Media: What else is there to say about this except that it is immensely gratifying to no longer need social media’s gratification? Plunge your phone into the sea. Delete the apps. Stay away from these shame traps.
    
    “A reckoning with burnout is so often the reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with — the things you fill your life with — feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?” ― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

    

17. Dark Beer Season: It is time for the hoppy IPA to return to the hamper of fermenting dirty socks it crawled out from. This is the season of stouts and porters and beer that tastes like coffee or chocolate—or both! A beer that you can settle down with. That sticks to your tongue. It is the season of the dark beer that will sit with you at the kitchen table all night while you and a friend laugh and laugh over an inside joke as the sun sets at 4pm.

    

18. Actual Weather: Colorado brags about its 300 days of sunshine a year, but some days I want a little action, you know? A flurry of clouds to whip up over the mountains. A stream of rain plinking against the roof. Even a blustery afternoon can feel like a reprieve from sun, sun, sun, sun, sun.
    
    In the last two weeks, nearly every day has had “weather”—something other than “moderate temps and sun.” I pay attention better when there’s weather. When the sky does something other than stand there with its big blue mouth hanging open.

    

19. Ritual: I keep myself sane through ritual. A bath at the end of an emotionally taxing day. A lit candle when I write. Chai before anything else. Playing the NYT games at bedtime to turn off my brain. Cleaning to feel cozy. Taking a walk when I want to send the meanest email of my life.
    
    Ritual keeps me tethered. Keeps me from doom-scrolling. Reminds me that I am in control of my life.