Ella Frances Sanders - Everything, Beautiful : A Guide to Finding Hidden Beauty in the World

Penguin Life

Ella Frances Sanders is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author and illustrator of four books, including Eating the Sun and Lost in Translation. She lives in a quiet slice of Scotland and spends a reasonable amount of time following patches of sunlight around the house.

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Copyright 2022 by Ella Frances Sanders

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A Penguin Life Book

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sanders, Ella Frances, author.

Title: Everything, beautiful : a guide to finding hidden beauty in the world / Ella Frances Sanders.

Description: New York, New York : Penguin Life, 2022.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022019362 | ISBN 9780143137061 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780525508564 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics.

Classification: LCC BH39 .S2565 2022 | DDC 111/.85--dc23/eng/20220705

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019362

Cover design and lettering: Ella Frances Sanders

Art direction: Elizabeth Yaffe

Designed by Cassandra Garruzzo Mueller, adpated for ebook by Cora Wigen

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For my best one

These days most of us are either constantly overwhelmed or getting very close to being constantly overwhelmed. And for those who do not feel overwhelmed in the slightest, there is usually a price being paid somewhere else. We are sent into spins of fear and feeling by all the things we need to get done, by the consequences of not doing those things, by the lack of time we have to process the deep and difficult happenings both in our close world and in the worlds of others, with the internet propelling us day in and day out toward noise, and comparison, and numbness. When the world feels unbearably large and largely out of control, what Ive found is that there is almost always reassurance and meaning to be found in the smallest of things, in the smallest of beauties.

While paramedics scooped up my tiny grandmother after she had fallen in the garden, I noticed and tried to commit to memory the peach-like scent of the orange-honey-colored roses behind me. When feeling a hard-to-define homesickness after living in a country that felt like too-tight shoes, I was soothed by noticing migrating geese overhead, the dune grasses swaying in time to the sea, the color of mold on a lemon, the oddly synchronized pedaling of a large group of cyclists as they set off around a peninsula.

We currently live in a beauty drought. This isnt because the beauty isnt there, but rather because our current definitions of the word are not spacious or welcoming or inclusive, and because beauty has been pressed into strange, stale shapes by people and systems that do not have our best interests at their heartsthey dont have hearts, in a way. The word beauty has left most of us feeling confused, less than, and undeserving. Feeling that beauty has left us behind. Beauty has become something to buy, something to own, something to flaunt, but as I was reading just this morning while eating a piece of distinctly average cheesecake:

* Susan Johnson

To me, beauty stands alongside love and gravity in holding the world together. From what I have observed, the only one of those we havent picked apart is gravity, but with love and beauty we have taken shadowy, winding roads that have, in fact, led us away from love, away from beauty.

However impractical it may seem, I am going to try and help you find your way back to beauty. Simply because when we are held together by beauty, there is more room for liberation and less room for fear. More room for gentleness, appreciation, and empathy.

It wont be as simple or as instant as refreshing a website that is loading too slowly for your liking. Rather, it will be more like putting a delicate, very broken vase back together. But it is crucially important that we crawl back to beauty however we can, to find new definitions of beauty that allow us to be fully ourselves, powerfully noticing, and expansively human.

My hope is that this book is an antidote to fear, to darkness, to dullness, to overwhelm, to lost-ness, to sleeplessness, and to missing.