Even beauty gets old.
Tom Waits: Bend Down the Branches

I wrote once this summer about this exhilarating feeling inside of me, this thing so beautiful that I was afraid to touch it for fear that it would melt, or worse, crumble, beneath my human touch. It was spiritual, it was new, it was mine, and it was me.

I am full of first times. We all are. We say always that something was the best day of our life, or the happiest memory, or the first time we felt something deep and real. And it's all true. Everything good is better than the last good thing because we have more experience under our feet and bottled in our hearts.

This was my first time to feel fully me. Fully alive. Fully free and fully brave. I felt that way in December of last year too. And before that in July. And once, I felt it prick me in March of 2005, a taste of what was to come. Each time I felt I had reached the pinnacle, it couldn't possibly get any better than this. Could it?

I'm not feeling particularly beautiful lately. The stuff of my heart looks ugly to me, and maybe to you too. I feel as though that pinnacle, once so tangible, is far far away, and the journey to it impossible. I'm not feeling fully me lately, not full of grace or the things I know are my portion and my inheritance. I feel dried, and used up, and old.

But this morning I remembered a prophetic word, spoken in that brief moment of life in March “You are like a stem, standing tall and straight in the wind, watching all your perfect petals fall around you. Asking what more, Lord? What more can you ask of me, I've given all the things I know to give? And I tell you, you will bloom again. You will blossom, and this time your fragrance will draw even the most reticent to come. Stand firm, then. You will bloom again.”

Because even beauty gets old. Even beauty gets wilted, and frosted, and under-appreciated. Even beauty, that thing we think is so sure, so perfect, so us—even that thing must die every season, has to feel that pinnacle of perfection and then that sting of death. So that we can see that even when everything has been given, and there is nothing left to do but stand firm, we do that.

The beauty is not in the perfection, the pinnacle, the sacrifice, or the promise, it is in the ability to trust that even stems still have roots and those things keep us strong when everything else is gone.