After my book about finding and making beauty in wounded places was published, people often asked me what they could do to bring on enough beauty to dispel grief. Not possible, I had to say. We must receive them both in equal measure, not sequentially but as layers that fold in and over one another: beauty and sorrow, beauty and sorrow. Beauty cannot permanently replace loss and sorrow, but it can, even when we’re in the depths of grief, temporarily lift those heavy emotions just enough to get us through a little while longer.

The challenge is to admit both grief and beauty and to recognize that we do not have to choose between them. That’s not easy. The temptation may be to fall so fully under the spell of the bad stuff that there’s no room for anything else, or you might turn your back on all that unpleasantness and find some way of distracting yourself from it or even disbelieving it.

However, there’s another temptation just as insidious: to ignore the gifts of happiness that crash through the sorrow, feeling they are somehow improper. They are not. Joy and sorrow braid together, like beauty and ugliness, like that which seduces and that which repels. To survive, to endure, to thrive is to open up to grief and beauty as fully as possible. In that way we bring more of our whole authentic human experience to life.