It can get depressing walking through the city – pushing my stroller and looking at the ground covered in litter, cigarette butts, and broken glass. But this morning I was inspired by some of the beautiful things in my own neighborhood and really started to see the glass as half-full. The trick is simply to stop staring at the ground and look up! It reminds me of the lyrics by one of my favorite songs (by my favorite artist) Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn:
If I think all the magic is gone / And I can’t fix it when it’s wrong
And the lights that were golden got dim / Caught up in a terrible wind
You say, Look up! Look up! find what you need
It pours out of you, what’s so buried in me
And I think, hey what’s up with all this stuff that I should keep
Gets me so sleepless, makes me all weak
But then you wake up, walk up, and the body you see
Comforts you how it’s so soft and so sweet
Let’s all say Look up! Look up! Find what we need
I’ll give some to you if you’ll give some to me
And I’ll think, hey what luck / Such magnificancies take me in divinity
And we’ll all live on live on the beautiful beast
Wrestling the tension I don’t want to need
Possibly the world’s most beautiful recycling project:
Philadelphia’s Magic Garden
“Wildflowers Grown Here”
Who wouldn’t want to recycle with bins like this?
I like a bike rack that looks like a bike rack
Sam likes to “roar” at these
My neighbors added a layer of topsoil to my new tree