Tag: moon

Holding the World In His Antlers

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

I took the photo this morning just after dawn. The sky was still indigo to the north. To the east, right of the barn a line of tangerine sky was appearing. And the great horned owls were calling from north and south. Sometime when the moon is rising red above the ridge, I want to position his antlers so I can catch the moon in their circle.

If you have followed my images of the stump over the past couple of years, you can see that this year, the surface is cratered. The wood is spongy and fragile, and there have been no new flowerings of mushrooms lately, though the slime molds and other creeping fungi are still having their day. It’s becoming treacherous to walk in the near vicinity of the stump because the roots have begun to rot, leaving troughs which radiate outward.

Gratitude List:
1. My most quiet student became very animated during a class discussion today, and told a story. It is such a satisfying thing for a teacher to hear the most quiet ones speak.
2. Cabbage for supper. Must be those Germanic genes, but cabbage is comfort food.
3. Listening to Brene Brown’s Braving the Wilderness. So much to learn.
4. Hard conversations
5. Community
May we walk in Beauty!

“…believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” —Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

Valarie Kaur: “What if this is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?”

“They say to dance like nobody is watching. I think that implies that we are afraid or ashamed to dance in front of the people. I say dance like everybody is watching. Dance like your children are watching, your ancestors, your family. Dance for those who are hurting, those who can’t dance, those who lost loved ones and those who suffer injustices throughout the world. Let every step be a prayer for humanity! Most of all dance for the Creator, who breathed into your soul so you may celebrate this gift of life!” —Supaman, hip hop and Powwow dancer

“Destroy the idea that men should respect women because we are their daughters, mothers, and sisters. Reinforce the idea that men should respect women because we are people.” —Radleigh Lauren

“Let the violence and pain in our world root you even more deeply in your commitment to be kinder and love harder, no matter the person or circumstance. Your great ability to love has everything to do with creating a more peaceful reality on our planet. Your love matters. It makes a critical difference. It helps us all.” —Scott Stabile

“What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words—we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.” —Dorothy Day

“As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.” —Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

Gayle Boss, comparing the precarious life of the chickadee to the chosen poverty of St. Francis: “Like the saint wed to Lady Poverty, every winter day the equation of their existence is open: Will there be enough of what they need to take them through the dark night, into tomorrow? Beyond reason, like the saint, they act as if the question is truly an opening, a freedom, a joy.”

“There’s an important distinction between the word ‘cure’ and the word ‘heal.’ In contemporary language, cure means to eradicate an illness or wound. But heal comes from the root “to make whole.” While some grief can not and should never be cured, it can be invited and allowed into one’s way of being in the world.” —from “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” by Toko-pa Turner

“The opposite of consumption is not frugality, it is generosity.”
—Raj Patel

“By reciting a myth, the storyteller remembers a creation, and, by remembering, is a part of that creating. It is best understood in that dreadful solecism “walkabout”. In walking, the Australians speak the land. Their feet make it new, now, and in its beginning. And the land speaks to them, now, anew, and in their beginning, by step and breath that meet in its dance, so that land and people sing as one.” —Alan Garner, The Voice That Thunders

“This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.” —Ben Okri

“So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,
one of which was you.” ―Mary Oliver

“A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.” —Nelson Mandela

“Never does Nature say one thing and Wisdom another.” —Juvenal

“There is a place where words are born of silence,
A place where the whispers of the heart arise.” —Rumi (Barks)

“Midway in our life’s journey,
I went astray
from the straight road
and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood.”
—Dante, first tercet of The Inferno

Duskwalking

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems
Goldfinch Farm, February 2023

I’d gotten into a rhythm, waking up in the mornings, putting on my sneakers, finding my prayer beads, greeting the dawn, and walking. It takes me about 30-40 minutes to go through the beads, and walking at a fast clip actually seemed to enhance the meditation while I followed my doctor’s orders to get more regular exercise.

But the new school year came along, and in order to get in that 40 minutes, I would have to wake up before 5. That just wasn’t going to happen. So I’ve started doing my walking meditations at night. The timing is a little less specific, and it can get pushed off in favor of last minute lesson prep or other obligations, if I’m not careful, but I am finding that duskwalking brings its own kind of magic.

Duskwalking Gratitude List:
1. Bats. I used to keep daily tabs on the bats when we were farming. There were two who roosted under the barn overhang for several years. Perhaps these are their descendants.
2. Owls! There really is nothing sweeter than the whinny of a screech owl in the dusk.
3. Lightning bugs. Still around in August!
4. Evening breeze.
5. The moon. For years, I have been keeping track of the moon’s cycling, but as I walk every evening, I see the shifts in her position from night to night as she changes shape.
May we walk in Beauty!

“Anyone who feeds on majesty becomes eloquent. The bee, From mystic inspiration, fills its rooms with honey.” ―Rumi

“A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.” ― John Ciardi

“The heart must be at rest before the mind, like a quiet lake under an unclouded summer evening, can reflect the solemn starlight and the splendid mysteries of heaven.”
―McDonald Clarke (1798–1842) New York poet

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors.

But today we kneel only to truth,
follow only beauty,
and obey only LOVE.
—Kahlil Gibran
****”
“How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Don’t Adapt

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Poems, Poetry Prompts
“Resist,” by Beth WK and the Wombo Dream AI. Poetry prompt: Adaptation–from Robert Lee Brewer at Writers Digest.

They will tell you you’re stronger
if you just adapt, just accept their maps
and guidebooks to the town called Normal.

How long will it take,
oh, how long will it take
till you’ve shaped your soul to the prevailing patterns,
till you’ve taken on cruelty as the modus of operation?

And when you’ve accepted your own degradation,
how long yet till you’re doing it, too,
till you’re telling the world
it’s just a song called Survival?

Oh, don’t give up your heart,
don’t learn their brutal tune,
don’t follow the marching orders
when your number is called.

Let them call you heretic, rebel, and witch.
Don’t let them make you afraid.
Keep your golden soul shiny,
keep your spirit intact.
Don’t adapt. Don’t adapt.

Gratitude List:
1. Contemplative donkey munching thistles in a field
2. The Moon!
3. The web that connects us all
4. A deer in the dawn watching me watch him
5. Breaking out of boxes of expectation
May we walk in Beauty!

“The stories I’m trying to write, and which I want to promote, are stories that contribute to the stability of my own culture, stories that elevate, that keep things from flying apart.” —Barry Lopez

“What the world wants, and people need, are people who believe in Something—Something that will lead them to the good, the beautiful, the true, and the universal.” —Richard Rohr

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” —James Baldwin

“I am not talking about giving our hearts over to despair. I wonder if we can train our hearts, intentionally, like athletes who train for a marathon, to bear the load without crumpling under the weight. I think that’s what the children need from us, for us to bear them, bear the stories, hold them as though they were our own, to be prepared to act at any moment for any one of them within our reach. I think the times call for hearts strong enough to be tender, to bleed without weakening, to rage and protect and pray and hope without numbing out.

“I don’t think it has to be a choice. We don’t have to choose between the closed heart and the broken heart. We can be awake and yet not despair. It’s worth a try.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider

“If we are going to see real development in the world, then our best investment is in women.” —Desmond Tutu

“Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.” —Alice Walker

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” —Marcus Aurelius

Found on a T-shirt: “I am totally happy and not dangerous mostly.”

“Part of the tragedy of our present culture is that all our attention is on the outer, the physical world. And yes, outer nature needs our attention; we need to act before it is too late, before we ravage and pollute the whole ecosystem. We need to save the seeds of life’s diversity. But there is an inner mystery to a human being, and this too needs to be rescued from our present wasteland; we need to keep alive the stories that nourish our souls. If we lose these seeds we will have lost a connection to life’s deeper meaning—then we will be left with an inner desolation as real as the outer.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Adrienne Rich: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility of more truth around her.”

Portent

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Musings, Poems
Shining Through

This moment actually happened last night as I was driving home. My mind made a meaning of it, where perhaps someone else might not have noticed the way the eagle flew, or watched the crow fly after. I think my point is that it’s not just that I am overly whimsical or that the spirits of the land had a specific message for me, but that we make the meaning we see, and that that does have portent and meaning because of the context we give it. And that perhaps not being ready to see, not paying attention, deprives us of inner connections we could be making.

Portent
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Last night as I crested Mt. Pisgah ridge
beneath a wispy crescent of a moon,
an eagle flew low across my vision
from west to east, across the moon
across the gold-splashed indigo dusk.

I’d caught my breath when
flying north to south, a solitary crow
crossed the eagle’s path
and disappeared into the growing dark.

I could say it was important. Potent.
A portent. Was I the only observer?
Was it a moment meant for me,
an implication for my mind to find?
Had I not been meandering homeward
at that very instant, would there have been
a meaning in that moment?

If a tree falls, and all that, right?
What I do know is
that within the world of me
there is now
a great X inscribed
by black wings
across an indigo sky,
saying, “Here, here, here.”

“You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.” —Fannie Lou Hamer*****”Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow*****“Silence is a frightening thing. Silence leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.” —Joan D. Chittister*****“The present moment is the intersection of eternity with time.” ―Beatrice Bruteau*****“Only the present moment contains life.” ―Thích Nhất Hạnh*****“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful—an endless prospect of magic and wonder.”―Ansel Adams*****“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.” ―Hermann Hesse, Demian*****“I went inside my heartto see how it was.Something there makes me hearthe whole world weeping.”―Rumi (Barks)*****”Did you ever hear a tree pushing out of the ground or the snow falling? Great things happen in silence.” ―Mother Angelica*****”Everything belongs, even the “bad” and dark parts of yourself. Nothing need be rejected or denied. No one need be hated. No one need be excommunicated, shunned, or eliminated. You don’t have time for that anymore. You’ve entered into the soul of the serene disciple where, because the Holy One has become one in you, you are able to see that oneness everywhere else. Almost like magic!” ―Richard Rohr*****“Our work is to show we have been breathed upon—to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live it out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowledge, from body, from dreams, and journeys of all sorts.” ―Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes*****“We found ourselves in a realmwhere dreams are formed,destiny is chosenand magic is as realas a handprint in the snow.”―Libba Bray

Poem a Day: 10

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Poems, Poetry Prompts

The Prompts Today are Washing Dishes (which I am choosing to interpret as general quotidian household living) and There was a _______ Who ______. I needed to get away from the brooding abstractions of yesterday and into something decidedly surreal, which is where I am usually most comfortable. I come home to magical realism when I lose my writer’s voice. I feel like I am catching my stride again.

There Was a Woman Who Swallowed the Moon
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

There once was a woman who swallowed the moon.
I will not tell you that I know her.
I will not tell you that this is a lie.

I knew a woman who swallowed the moon,
felt the ice and the fire of it slide down her spine.
(No, not her throat.)
How it slid down her spine.
How it sizzled. How it burned.

I once knew a woman who swallowed a lie.
Felt it explode in her belly like stars.
Felt how her own light dimmed
and almost went out.
Girl, was she ever a mess!

I know a woman who lives in a house,
and this is how she exists in that house:
She sews things together.
She makes knots in strings.
She throws words in the air
to see which ones fall together.
She wanders down labyrinth hallways
weaving her fingerprints into all that she passes.
She steals words. This woman is a thief of words.
Just listen:

There once was a woman who wept a river.
I will not say if the river is tears.
I will not tell you about the mud,
and the stones, and the sycamore.
But this I can say:
when the weeping was done,
the river flowed through her house.
The words bobbed in the flow,
and the lie was extinguished,
and the moon was a boat she climbed into.

There once was a woman who sailed on the moon.
This is how she wailed.
This is how she moaned.
This is how she danced.
This is how she trailed a net behind her
to rescue the words she had lost.

Advent 21: The Shortest Day

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Advent, Gratitudes, Musings

We arrive at the shortest day.
Silence.
Stillness.
This moment, when I am writing, is the darkness just before the dawn.
The year, too, is dawning.
Sit in the dark.
Feel the empty quiet around you.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Holy, holy, holy.

Gratitude List:
1. Laughing with my family. Somebody said last night that they were glad we get to celebrate Winter Stoltzfus together.
2. The long night is over and the day is dawning.
3. There are still many days to become acquainted with the shadows, but the light is returning.
4. How the house lights make the dew sparkle and twinkle. Light and shadow. Light and shadow
5. Now the day begins, the laughter, the clatter, the murmurs, the music the twinkling eyes.

May your day be filled with Shine!

Mist, Moon, Mist

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Uncategorized


As November 6 approaches, and amid all the squeamishness I am feeling about the privileged way we do politics in this country, I am thinking about the “right” to vote.

June 4, 1919: The 19th Amendment finally offered women the right to vote in this country.

Except. Only White Women. Women put their bodies on the line for this right. They went to jail. They were beaten. They were brutally force-fed during hunger strikes. They were called terrible names, and experienced social shaming that destroyed their reputations. And they were white women, and they fought for white women. Some of my heras from that fight were notably silent on the subject of race. Others actively campaigned against women of color being included in the mix.

On this hand over here, I honor them for their selfless and courageous fight. They saw their moment and they took it, and the world was at least a marginally better place for it.

On this hand over here, though: Is it a victory, really, if it actively marginalizes such a large number of us?

My heras have feet of clay. Fatal flaws. Lack of real vision and insight and completely human compassion. Still, their work paved the way. But not for all of us. Did it at least open the door for all of us?

The Snyder Act, in 1924, finally gave the country’s original inhabitants the right to vote, five years after white women could vote. And looking at the kinds of voter suppression that took place for African American people after white people finally passed the 15th Amendment, it’s likely that many Native American women didn’t vote until much later.

While the 15th Amendment in 1870 ostensibly gave African American men the right to vote, we don’t have to look so far back into the mists of history to see how recently the Voting Rights Act was passed, to REALLY give black people the right to vote. It was on 1965, two years before I was born, and I’m not that old. So, while my grandmothers could have voted if they’d wanted to (it was against their religious principles, so they didn’t), my grandmothers’ African American sisters couldn’t vote until they were in their forties or fifties.

So this year I won’t be posting any images of the white suffragettes marching for women’s right to vote, as door-opening as that period was, as sacrificial as they were. And I am having trouble celebrating any movement to bring about ACTUAL Democratic voting in this country while the Supreme Court can take away the voting rights of First Nations people in North Dakota, while unscrupulous people are suppressing the black vote in Georgia, while elderly black voters are removed from a bus taking them to a polling place. There are more stories. Look them up.

I will honor the intent of the suffragettes who fought for the right to vote, for the doors they opened, and I will truly celebrate the life and work of the tireless Congressman John Lewis, who nearly died in the fight to bring about the Voting Rights Act.

There will always be undemocratic forces in this country that try to garner power for their own ends, to control the people. Voting, and fighting for the voice of all people to vote, is part of the bedrock of the democratic process.  And I will speak out–and I beg you to speak out, too–for the rights of ALL Americans to vote for those who are chosen to speak for us in the halls of power.

Gratitude List:
1. Good fiction. I am listening to The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. I don’t know why post-apocalyptic literature is so charmingly comforting in these difficult times. Perhaps it has to do with reminding me that things aren’t as bad as all that. Yet. Feel free to psychoanalyze me.
2. Speaking Truth to Power–all the people who do so
3. Cool fall days
4. The river, the river, the river
5. Magical, prayerful, contemplative acts

May we walk in Beauty!

Rhapsody Part 7 – Mary Oliver

If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves.
If you are in the sea I will slide into that
smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt.
But if you are sad, I will not dress myself in desolation.
I will present myself with all the laughters I can muster.
And if you are angry I will come, calm and steady, with
some small and easy story.
Promises, promises, promises! The tongue jabbers, the heart
strives, fails, strives again. The world is perfect.
Love, however,
is an opera, a history, a long walk, that
includes falling and rising, falling and rising, while
the heart stays as sweet as a peach, as radiant and
grateful as the deep leaved hills.
*
“You either walk inside your story & own it or you stand outside your story & hustle for your worthiness.” ~BRENÉ BROWN
*
Duck, duck, goose.
Goose, goose, wren.
Mist, moon, mist.
October.
–Beth Weaver-Kreider
*
“Live the question now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some day into the answer.” –Rainer Maria Rilke
*
“and if i hear one more time
about a fool’s rights
to his tools of rage
I’m gonna take all my friends
and I’m gonna move to Canada
and we’re gonna die of old age” –Ani Difranco

Luna on the Hill

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Poems

I wrote this poem on 8 October 2014, after seeing part of a lunar eclipse one early morning on my way to work. This morning, again, as we crested Pisgah ridge, the ball of the moon was rolling off over the far hills, a smudge of Earth-shadow beginning to veil her face.

What Moth? What Butterfly?
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

The raucous owls were silent in their bamboo haunts
this morning as I rushed up the hill to meet the moon
emerging from her umbral shadow,
from her ombre ochre cocoon.

What moth will she become?
What butterfly will I?

I sat a moment at the junction where my road
meets the ridge, Mt. Pisgah Road before me,
then the tidy fence,
the dusky hill meadow,
a lacy line of trees across the hilltop,
and the changing moon above in chestnut orange glory
nestled into the indigo dawning.

I caught glimpses of her on my way down the ridge
and then in my mirror as I crossed the bridge
over the water and under the last dusk of night
and I saw then that she was only now just fading into the shadow,
only entering her transformation.

I had to leave her there behind me to do her work
behind the veils of dusky morning
while I drove into the shining pink of sunrise,
Venus riding high before me
and two crows above,
lifting their wings in alleluia.

The Dragon of Solstice

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings


Not the clearest picture, perhaps. One of the riders in my car took it, and my camera doesn’t handle near-darkness very well. This was in the early stages of her metamorphosis. About five minutes later, she was looking more dragonish than ever.

Now we are several hours into Longest Night. Tomorrow, we begin the inward turn again. Now is the time to settle into the darkness. To breathe. To dream. To melt.

In my own sacred calendar, the night of Solstice begins the deepest dreamtime of the year, almost time out of time. From now until the first of the year, or until Epiphany, I will monitor and mine my dreams for the images that will guide me in the coming year. Already, my dreams have been tossing up some powerful images to begin the percolation.

May your dreams in this, the Longest Night, bring you peace and hope. May they invigorate and inspire and challenge you for the work ahead. For there is much work ahead. There will be need of wakefulness and wisdom.

Much Love and Beauty to you.

Gratitude List:
1. This evening on the way home from school, just as the sun was setting, and the day was opening the curtains into the Longest Night, a great dragon swept across the sky, casting its body from east, and around the bowl of sky, into the west. Its head lay directly in front of us, toward the setting sun. It had swallowed the sliver of a horned moon. If you weren’t looking closely, as we were, you might have taken it for a cloud. We decided that The Dragon of the Solstice was offering us a portent or a message for the dying year: Be fierce. Take up all the space you are given. Believe in miracles. Hold the Moon inside you.

2. The geese and little birds are crossing the sky these early mornings and late evening, like mysterious scripts that someone, certainly, will be able to read, but my eyes are not trained to interpret this alphabet. Still, like Korean or Chinese or Hindi or Arabic, it catches my eye and draws me in with the sense of the meaning that is there behind the lines, but to me is only Beauty.

3. I have many friends and beloveds who are perfectly yourselves. Divinely, wondrously, solidly, and delightfully yourselves. Where would I be without you, without your inspiration, without your challenges? You keep me honest. You help me to be my better self. So much of my own shine is reflection from you. You’re the moon I carry inside me.

4. Rage has lessons to teach me. I’ll try to be grateful now simply to know that, although it burns to carry those coals inside. Sometimes, I think I have learned the lessons–the vocabulary, the angles and calculations, the social history, the science–of rage, but then I find myself back in the primary class. It takes some of us a little longer to learn. I will be patient with myself.

5. I have a class of quite energetic, distractible students who have experienced a high degree of frustration with the subject at hand. Often, the most carefully-planned lessons fall flat, but they can’t handle too much spontaneity, either. I really need to work hard with them on writing, and I have been nervous about that for several reasons. One boy often freezes when I ask them to write. Another can’t handle silent, quiet work and creates so many distractions the others can’t work.

Still, I decided that yesterday I would give them five prompts and have them write about one or more for the whole period. With only one exception, they got to work with a will, several of them asking if they could write whatever they wanted instead of the prompts. I had them share their documents with me, and I would check in on them, offering comments and responses on their documents. At the end of the period, they begged for another day of writing.

Today, we wrote again, for the whole period. Some incredible stories are emerging. We’re doing absolutely no editing at this point, and things are pretty raw, but it will give us something to work on in the next step. The only student who couldn’t handle it yesterday came in today with a page and a half that he’d written between yesterday’s class and today. Everyone buckled down and wrote today. They begged for a third day of writing.

I am going to tempt the magic for one more day. Then we may have to move to other things: some more direct work on the basic grammar and sentence structure points, and other sorts of literacy and fluency work.

I am grateful for moments of magic in the classroom.

May we walk in Beauty!