FINDING DEEP BEAUTY
I suppose what has always struck me -- and so many others --the most about the arts is simply the mindblowing beauty that can be achieved. Things happen in music, visual arts, words, acting, movement that seem impossible in any other context. I still feel chills and an inability to speak when I hear or see the myriad miracles which come from artistic expression. The heart-pounding thrill when I heard a Beethoven concerto or watched a thrilling circus act or glimpsed a famous person as a child is still there and it still feels just as overwhelming. Maybe that is why I think we artists are the luckiest people alive. Not only do we get to experience the same astounding highs of the arts, but we get to be an inner part of it. That is also why we feel the deepest pain, the length of frustration and sadness, the sharpness of division and misunderstanding and jealousy which have wracked the human world since it began. So in times like the present, when the worst public health crisi