Longing for Beautiful Days

As winter approaches, I’ve been reading several books on weathering the harshest season with joy instead of dread. Being a winter-lover all my life, I am surprised to feel less happy and a great deal colder during the season.

This year, I didn’t want summer to end – it was too beautiful to let go.  I wandered a botanical garden with my grandchildren imagining them as the children in The Secret Garden.  I lollygagged outdoors on my rattan loveseat, its bright cushions echoing the blooms around me.  I took a few small journeys to glorious places and most joyously, I spent time with people that I love.  Those were the most beautiful summer days — rich, vivid, and filled with something hard to name but deeply felt. Days like that lift me to a higher plane of living, their memory feeding me long afterward. I try to create other beautiful moments to continue the momentum, especially as the cold months draw near. But I ask myself: what is behind this longing for beauty?

It isn’t only about people, though love is part of it. Sometimes our hunger for beauty is stirred by a movie scene that lingers in the heart, or by a painting in a museum that arrests us with its quiet power. It might arrive over a cup of tea in a café, watching the street life pass outside. I feel it when I gaze at an old house and imagine the lives once lived there — their dinners, their clothes, their long evenings by lamplight.

I felt it again when I picked up an old novel describing a golden autumn afternoon, and a homesickness rose in me — not for a place I’ve known, but for something I somehow lost. Yesterday it returned as I listened to a strange and lovely piece of music whose tender chords seemed to echo a hunger in my soul. Perhaps it’s the memory of a wound from long ago — a separation that happened before memory itself.

We search for something to touch, to connect with, on those special days because we are, in some sense, homesick — aware of an obscure absence woven through both joy and pain, light and loss. If we follow that feeling, it can lead us toward days of beauty that fill the emptiness of this unnamed exile within us.

Our yearning for beauty matters because it reminds us of what is eternal — that even as we face illness, aging, and grief, we still crave it. It’s why we buy flowers, wear perfume, seek out art and music, read good books, and cherish time with loving friends.  I no longer want days I can touch, I want days I can hold in my arms…

What are your beautiful days? How do you find beauty in a broken world? Is your longing, too, a kind of ache from far away — an ache that makes your days more exquisite because you know what pain and loss have taught you?