The world is covered in ice today, and the trees that have stood brown and bare and ugly since the end of November are suddenly sparkling and shining and brilliant.
Everywhere you look, people are sharing photos of their yard, their street, their neighborhood, and captions all relate to the beauty of what the picture shows.
And they aren’t wrong. It is absolutely beautiful.
Yet, as I stood outside, today, looking at the blinding reflections of the sun off of the branches, all around me, the air was full of the sounds of the branches, crackling and groaning under the weight of the ice.
That beauty is heavy and it threatens to bend and break even the strongest of branches that have held their own for hundreds of years.
As I stood out there, looking around, I began thinking about how heavy the metaphorical beauty we wear in public can be and how it so paralleled the weight of the ice on the trees.
The ice is like the facade we show to people. The happy Facebook photos. The silly Instagram posts. The funny tweets. That public face we show to the world where we pretend like everything shines, like we are always smiling; that we are always radiating patience and goodness.
I was thinking how heavy that can be to maintain. The time we spend in figuring out just the right word to make the sentence perfect, or the amount of times we retake a photo until we are satisfied that people will look and approve.
It’s heavy. It’s a heavy weight that can pull down on our minds and hearts and souls until we bend. Until we break under the pressure.
And we might bend. And we might break.
But the hope is that our core…the older, brown, solid wood that hides beneath the gleaming ice…can stay strong. That we can weather the storm and shake off the momentary glitz and glamour, and go back to the true us.
And that we can learn to love our true selves enough to share that with the world
Our knots and decay. Our good and our bad. Our beautiful days and our ugly moments.
That’s the real beauty. Not the fleeting moments that we crafted or had to capture before they were gone. The every day. The ins and outs. The ups and down.
Those things are beautiful because they are relatable. They are the things we all have in common.
They are the human experience and there is nothing more worthy of sharing than that.
Because the ice? It will be gone tomorrow. But those trees? They’ll last so much longer, and it’s the imperfections in those bare branches where the true beauty lies.
