Five Things of Beauty #6

Posts in this series are meant as a gift for paying subscribers and are behind a paywall. However, the first five letters in the series are free for anyone to read. Check them out!

Hello!

I've been wanting to resurrect the Things of Beauty series from my old newsletter for a while now, to share it as a small gift in gratitude for my paid supporters. It's just a little thing, but I hope it will brighten your day.

1. Beautiful Birds

"Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts."

Driving home this morning, just minutes after the sun had muscled over the mountains to the east, those words of Wendell Berry's popped into my mind. The sun blazed across a thick layer of tule fog that lay over the estuary to my right and the mist rising from the bay to my left. Near-horizontal rays illuminated the wisps threading from the top of each, which looked like nothing so much as nature spirits drifting above the earth and ocean. Glancing up, I saw the two biggest Vs of migrating birds I've ever seen, too high for me to make out, but man, they were really moving. Hundreds of birds arrowed directly south.

I'd just finished writing my latest piece here, a hard one about the intractability of the billionaire problem and how extreme wealth is harming our planet. But something about that combined vision of sun-lit, inspirited fog and the massive migration above exploded inside my chest in a wave of pure joy, untouchable by the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.