news from a country not yet visited

Well, our hopes of gazing at beauty on a weekly basis didn't quite pan out since our visit to the Griffith Observatory. The following week, we found ourselves trapped between the burning mountains to the east and more flames to the west. With the beach and the mountains out of reach, there's not much else to see in California. We watched helplessly as the historic wild fire engulfed my old neighborhood in San Diego and beyond, a region I covered for the San Diego Union-Tribune for two years. As I listened to reports of the public hospital behind my old apartment being evacuated, patients filing into school buses, I wondered where I would have been had I stayed in San Diego. Probably living out of a sleeping bag in the newsroom.

Since then, Aric and I have been spinning our wheels, clocking in and out of work, exercising, cooking, seeing friends and hosting gatherings at our apartment. Here and there, I've caught moments of something beautiful -- a child's small hand slipping into mine, a hearty laughter with friends, the words of Emily Dickinson's poem "Proof" on my cubicle, a silent cup of coffee with my husband on our porch before a golden sunset. And I've begun to wonder why I have this obsession with finding beauty in my life. Then I came across this.

I am trying to rip open the unconsolable secret in each one of you -- the secret which hurts so much that you take revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism or Adolescence... the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter... The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was a longing... for they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not yet visited.
-- C.S. Lewis, "Weight of Glory"