By Elizabeth

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I’m so into pretty things. 

It’s something I’ve struggled to get comfortable with my whole life. 

There’s a lot of messaging out there that says pursuing beauty is frivolous—it’s vain to want to look beautiful, and it’s materialistic to want to surround yourself with beautiful things. 

I’ve always been a person that loves exactly those physical manifestations of beauty—from the perfect lipstick (shout out to Boomstick Color^®!) to great sheets, it’s something I’ve often judged myself for.

It’s not just about what happens in your brain when you absorb and experience beauty, it’s the way that tuning yourself to the frequency of beauty leads to greater presence and groundedness. 

Here's an example: the other day I walked purposefully into the grocery store with my list in hand, then I got totally waylaid by the flower section at the front of the store. 

It’s peony season—my favorite—and there was this absolutely jaw-dropping abundance of cut peonies for sale in all sorts of gorgeous colors. 

I smiled as soon as I saw them, then took a few minutes to smell the ones that had already opened. Heaven. 

I thought about how good the pale pink ones would look in a Talavera vase I have, which I bought a very long time ago on a trip to Mexico with my parents. 

The idea of the pale pink of the blossoms against the blue and white of the vase made me smile, as did the memory of that trip.

That includes both memories of my parents and that special trip we took, and the much more recent pleasure of sharing a moment of intimacy with this stranger, who also happened to love peonies. 

So much of life encourages us to just pass through. Get on with it.

That Tuesday morning at the grocery store might have passed into the distant, unremarkable pile of time I’ve spent on this earth that I no longer remember, except…it didn’t. 

Seeking stuff for stuff’s sake is, indeed, a toxic practice, one that I have written about before and will write about again because I struggle with it. 

But seeking beauty—that I’m leaning into for the rest of my days. Beauty is a pathway to presence. 

How do you cultivate beauty in your daily life?

Elizabeth is a journalist who has been writing about health, beauty and wellness for over 20 years. She lives in Northern New Mexico with her two dogs and several hundred trees, shrubs, bushes and succulents.