On the Necessity of Beauty
For the beauty we gather, the beauty we’re denied, and the beauty we make anyway.
Last summer, I played a game with my siblings called Values. We broke out a deck of fifty cards, each printed with a single value: knowledge, compassion, empathy, and so on. First, you sort them into three piles: Important, Very Important, Not Important. Then, you keep narrowing until only a top five remain. When my turn was over, my siblings scanned my final cards: love, community, creativity, freedom ~ and then stopped at the last one. “Beauty?” my brother asked, frowning a little. “Why?”
“Because it connects me to our aliveness.” I responded, smiling.
I get his questioning. Compared to other values, beauty seems frivolous. Consider the consumerism of the beauty industry, bolstering a $470 billion dollar global market in 2025 (McKinsey) that only continues to boom. Or beauty standards, reinforced by racism, sexism, colorism, ableism, anti-fatness, classism, and gender norms. Beauty, at its most harmless, can be dismissed as an aesthetic distraction. More covertly, it contains violent possibility and history when entangled with morality, capitalism, desirability, and power.
When I tell my friends “I want a beautiful life,” I mean another kind of praxis.
I mean beauty that returns me to a sense of reverence. The kind of beauty that syrups time, making it golden and delicious and slow. On a lonely Friday I watch a sunset and in the colors I remember all the ancestors before and after me that also looked up to the sky. The surprise beauty of being greeted by a new leaf on my peperomia plant, waving proud and green. The way my homie laughed my name on their couch last night and I re-played the beautiful sound all the way home.
I mean the kind of beauty hidden in the pockets of the everyday that reminds me of the quiet magic of living. The beauty that turns our attention beyond our inner mirror and towards the tenderness ever-surrounding us.
Elaine Scarry, a scholar of aesthetics, writes that beauty has the power to radically decenter us. It asks us to pause, look, and be moved by something beyond the perimeter of the self. We no longer need to be the center, we “willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us.” I see this ceding every full moon, in the blurry moon photos everyone feels compelled to share. This kind of beauty is waiting for us, if we’re willing to still and soften so we can see it.
Here are some truths: we all die, we all need each other, and we are all drawn towards that which makes us feel both fantastically small and woven into the great and mysterious web of being. The shooting star I caught last summer. Biting into a perfectly ripe fruit on a lonely Sunday morning. A smile I shared with a stranger while browsing the aisles of my local library. My favorite tree blowing its spring petals to the wind. Small reminders that we are, as Ross Gay would put, “beneficiar[ies] of a largeness so large, and so deep, you will never in one lifetime get to the bottom of it.”
In an era of fractured attention and an epidemic of loneliness, it’s meaningful to protect practices that ask us to slow and feed our individual and collective sense of awe. I want to consider what it means to value beauty outside the logic of capital.
The imagination of the market limits us to questions of commodity: how can this be sold, optimized, scaled? There is a practice of beauty that slips control and instead breaks us open.
In getting older, I’ve started to cry more. Most recently: at an Esperanza Spalding concert, while reading a Tracy K. Smith poem, in watching the gentle way my grandmother waters her plants. When our political and societal climate holds so much despair, confusion and apathy, these reminders of the unrelenting extraordinary become a precious and necessary meal.
I often return to Toni Morrison’s words in her 1993 interview with The Paris Review:
“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating and then representing beauty is what humans do. With or without authorities telling us what it is, I think it would exist in any case. The startle and the wonder of being in this place. This overwhelming beauty—some of it is natural, some of it is man-made, some of it is casual, some of it is a mere glance—is an absolute necessity. I don’t think we can do without it anymore than we can do without dreams or oxygen.”
When Toni Morrison speaks to beauty, she brings in an element of necessity that underscores its political nature. If beauty is a human need, then we need to ask who is allowed access to it, and who is made to live without it.
We see this in the nature gap, where communities of color and low-income communities are less likely to have access to nature. Black communities in particular are most likely to live in nature-deprived areas. We see this in how surveillance, racial profiling, hostile architecture, curfews, anti-loitering rules, and “respectability” expectations shape who gets to rest, gather, play, be loud, be alive, and be joyful in public. I’ve been reading Sam Bloch’s In Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. In it, Bloch explains how L.A. police have discouraged or removed trees because shade enables gathering and interferes with surveillance. Sometimes beauty is withheld through neglect. Sometimes, it’s actively destroyed because it supports public life.
At times I’ve felt guilty for centering beauty. How can I want a “soft life” in a time of so much violence, war, and political unrest? Is centering beauty dissociation, or a means of looking away from the horrors of the world than need our attention and care? It can be. The difference between beauty as distraction or as sustenance is the action it alchemizes within us. I think of cultural worker and activist Toni Cade Bambara, who said, “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” When Bambara speaks to irresistibility, she notes it as a necessary method of revivifying our ability to remain in movement work. Beauty has teeth. It can be a balm offering healing, and a flame igniting us to remember what’s important to protect.
I’ve long been a person who gathers beauty. In flowers, in sentences, meals, glances, in the way the table is set before my homies arrive, in the sweetness of a dawn yawning gently into morning. If beauty is a means of widening attention, I want that attention to be tender and awake, to both feel wonder, and able to name the systems that keep wonder out of reach.
Last Sunday, I danced with strangers at the park, and Barbara Tucker’s 1994 house track “Beautiful People” boomed over the speakers. “Beautiful people / sing with me / beautiful people / work with me” Barbara sang, and indeed the people worked, whistled, sweat, cackled, got lost in the beat and found divinity on a dance floor. This too is a beauty I want to protect. The kind that sparks a communal recognition of sensorial pleasure, blurring the edges between us.
In one of my favorite podcast episodes ever done, poet John O’Donohue notes:
“Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness…Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.”
May you witness an everyday beauty this week that reminds you of your depths, that reminds you we are held by more than we can name.
with many young leaves,
Annika
p.s., what small beauty have you witnessed lately?
💿 What I’m Listening To
A playlist of songs for you to slow and find beauty in the notes
🌀 Come explore the beauty of curiosity
Along with seeking beauty, I’m also trying to build more places where we can actually practice returning to it.
Curiosity Lab is a 4-week creative play lab for qtbipoc who want protected time to make, play, write, experiment, or finally touch the idea that keeps tapping you on the shoulder. It’s a pretty simple structure: We name what we’re working on, make beside each other, be beginners in public, and let communal support make starting feel less impossible.
We start Tuesday, May 19 in Brooklyn. I’d love to see you there.
⚽️ Come play
Bad Ball Club is back in Brooklyn Saturday May 16 if you wanna run around in the sun with other black and brown trans and queer sporty babes and play not-serious kickball! Come thru.
☁️ Join School of Softness
School of Softness is an experimental school and studio studying tendereness both online and IRL, open to all. Sign up for the email list to learn about future classes and gatherings.
I wish I could post pictures here but here’s what I’ve noticed (all the way from Belgium!): the way flowers are springing up all over the park in my neighborhood, the hazel eye color of my dog when they hit the sun, how it feels to hug someone you haven’t known for long but it feels familiar, how green the grass gets after a good rain fall, the multitude of bird choirs, the way the light hits the kitchen at 7 A.M. How my mothers voice sounds when she laughs, the sunlight trough leaves that feel like God is peeking trough, how a butterfly wouldn’t stop following this older lady on her walk. 🌀🦋
My daughter likes to take walks around new neighborhoods and pick flowers from the gardens of strangers, she’s reminds me that we are born with a soft curiosity and draw to beauty in nature and architecture, that one doesn’t need to travel far to experience these things. I always arrive home with a pocket full of dead picked flowers. I adorn our altar with it.