Acceptance does not mean surrender. It does not mean resignation. Acceptance means I am finally available to the entire spectrum of creative responses.

To see a place as orphaned or wounded is also to reexamine the meaning of living and dying and to allow some curiosity and even a sense of marvel to emerge about the tactics things employ to persevere.

Learning to live with wounded places is a mission threaded with find¬ing and making beauty. If I’m open to the likelihood of it, I can always find beauty under any circumstances, whether it’s in a kindly gesture from a stranger or the first shoot of greenery shoving up through the waste of a calamitous event. Beauty is the antidote to grief and despair, and it is the one sure thing I can bring to bear when I confront a place that has fallen on hard times.

When you spend any time at all paying attention to the proclivities of the natural world, you realize that nature has no problem including in its sorority the dead, dying, and ailing as fully as the lovely, healthy, and whole.