May 7, 2025
From the chair where I sit most mornings to pray and write, I can see out a window to an expanse of sky draped lavishly over a spread of trees, a break in the city-scape afforded by a sliver of a national park that follows a through road in a stream valley several stories down from the second floor of my house, where I perch.
The sky is often inky gray when I first come, early, to find silence before kids arise. Sometimes it’s gray again, thin dull light spread over the horizon, by the time I finish my meditation, eyes closed often as not, whatever sunrise there may have been glimmering and gone while I prayed.
Other days I catch a glimpse of bursting color, shimmering fluffy beams of apricot and salmon shooting across a dark blue sky layered with hints of honeyed light, a panoramic show that stops me in my tracks and calls for any meditation to be made eyes open. I watch in awe, sometimes trying to photograph the glory but never satisfied with what it captures, just as no words describing a sunrise do a particularly good job. It’s primarily something to be witnessed live, the beauty it holds available only here, only now—not portable or delayable, freely available but not infinite, unlimited but only within this tiny sliver of space and time.
As I watch, the colors fade, the sun establishes itself above the treeline in a distant angle out of my sight line. The sky assumes the solid blue or faded white of whatever kind of day we’re having, lovely in its own right but no longer glorious. Sometimes the sun will sneak through, light up a row of clouds, activating a bright glowing yellow on the sunward edge in contrast to the shadowed backsides, a live Hudson school painting. The sunward face of the trees might shine in the light, the leaves briefly iridescent.
But the sun keeps moving and that honeyed light also fades.
From this chair I see, as well, two vases of flowers picked from my garden. On the desk is a small vase of puffy roses, “Eden climber,” a stunner on the pages of a catalog generating serious rose envy—but now, I can hardly believe it, those gossamer images are mine in real life! The roses are charming puff balls, fat and round, dozens of tightly gathered petals, white on the outside with a distinct pink tinge. They droop casually in a clear blueish vase that beautifully showcases their delicate coloring. Each petal is a wonder in its own right, the group of roses is Downton Abbey perfect.
My climbing rose is in its third year and after one year of primarily establishing roots, and one year of making its way up the trellis and pillars of our porch, it’s now set dozens of buds, polka dotting the corner of the yard with these gorgeous blooms. They’re not really cut flowers, meant to carpet a trellis or gate. But I’m greedy to enjoy them all day long so I snip a half dozen from the backside, where they’re visible primarily to the starlings who seek a nest in the eaves of the places where our house adjoins to our rowhouse neighbors. Droopy, fat flowers on tiny stems, the bunch sits gathered in the vase like a wedding bouquet, a work of art on which to periodically fix my gaze as I sit at my desk to work.
Behind them sits a taller vase with two peonies in it, Etched Salmon—a vibrant but delicate peachy pink when I picked them that opens and softens as the flower ages. Now, the color has faded entirely to white and the petals droop mournfully from the fat center stamens. The flowers’ moment is gone, the once stunning peonies are primarily a task to take care of, compost to toss.
Nothing gold can stay, Robert Frost warns. Springtime is replete with beauty, golden leaves, flowering trees—but only so an hour, “so Eden sank to grief.” Basically my spent peonies are on par with the fall of man.
“Nothing gold can stay” is a gorgeous, heartbreaking bummer of an observation. It’s true, in an immediate tactile way, of course. The house gets cleaned, thanks to a bundle of cash I venmo my cleaning service every couple weeks, and no sooner has it been dusted to a sparkle my kids get home from school and the detritus of their backpacks, muddy prints, dropped food, spilled drips of water all decorate the once-briefly-pristine floor. Nothing gold can stay.
My infant daughter’s milk-dazed sleep on my chest—the same girl who now shrieks at me that I’m the worst mom ever. Nothing gold can stay.
A benevolent soul sets out piles of old bread for the neighborhood wrens, though all evidence of the gesture will be gone by mid-morning and they’ll only hunger again. Nothing gold can stay.
The peonies, the sunrise, these gorgeous roses in a few more days—gone. And then, it’s as if they will never have been here at all, blank space where the beauty once sat. Nothing gold can stay.
What’s the point? Why bother? If nothing gold stays, should we swear off gold, settle for durable, sensible things?
And yet, I keep gardening, feeding my rose bushes, ordering new bareroot peonies. I keep wiping off a dirty table and brushing teeth. From having more children to making sandcastles, we as a species keep creating beauty in innumerable ways. I learn in writing this (looking for something else) that the top-searched word on Thesaurus.com is . . . beauty:
(One could write an entire post about the meaning of the full list . . . )
From children to sandcastles, all of it is, to some degree, ephemeral. Yet short-lived nature of good things doesn’t seem to stop us from desiring them, or working for them. What do we do with that?
If the point of gold is possession, the ephemeral nature would indeed be a problem. But what if it’s not?
What if the gold, when we see it—in the free sunrise we cannot capture with words or film, in the stunning flowering blooms in someone else’s yard—I’m making a stretch, but can’t help but go here—in the persevering years of commitment to prevent AIDS or malaria in a cash-strapped country yanked out from under you in one wood-chipping weekend by the world’s wealthiest man, is not about having?
I’ll be honest, I’m working backwards from a view I already hold, intuitively, not because I was argued into it. I think beauty matters.
I think ephemeral beauty matters.
I think the investment of energy into short-lived goodness, acts of kindness that vanish into seeming nothingness in the crush of busy life, efforts to generate something meaningful which does not endure in visible form all matter, are worth it.
Another way of saying it is I don’t think accumulation or durability is the test of worth. Why not?
This is not the last word on this topic. I’m writing, whether for publication here or elsewhere, a longer piece exploring this question. In the mean time, I’m simply raising it in myself and inviting you to sit with it too. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
