How will you serve the cause of beauty and justice?
Yesterday, I was working on the above design for a postcard I was sending to someone, and as I did, I contemplated the words I used.
“Create beauty. Seek justice. Share both.”
If you ask me about my passions, what will almost always come out will be some version of “beauty and justice”. It’s at the core of who I am. It’s what drove me to start this website.
It’s hard to separate beauty from justice (and vice versa). I believe that they are so closely intertwined that to seek one is to invite the other and to abandon one is to banish the other. Neither are luxuries - we need them both desperately.
I have gone to the ends of the earth in search of both beauty and justice, and I have seen both in the most dismal and unexpected places. In a tiny poverty-stricken village in India among the low caste people, I saw courageous young people rescuing young girls from sexual slavery. In another village in Bangladesh (where the above photo was taken), I saw beautiful women in boldly coloured saris learning to weave baskets so that their children would have food to eat. In drought-stricken, seemingly hopeless regions of Kenya, I saw women wearing the most outrageous colourful beaded jewelery laughing as they prepared the evening meal. In Ethiopia – a country that everyone assumes is nothing but famine and hopelessness – I saw the most astonishingly beautiful scenery and met the most amazingly strong and proud people.
I want to commit my life to creating (and seeking) beauty, seeking (and fostering) justice and sharing them both.
What about you? Will you join me in this commitment?
In the comments I would love to hear one small thing you commit to doing this coming year in the service of beauty and justice. Paint a picture, give to a charity, do SOMETHING.
Hi, I'm Heather Plett. I'm excited that you've stopped by to learn more about how we can make the world a better place through the sharing of our gifts and creativity. I've been thinking about these topics for a lot of years now. Through my work in creative communication, workshop facilitation, fundraising, leadership training, and freelance writing, I've gathered a lot of wisdom and stories from my own experiences and the experiences of the people I've been blessed with knowing.
There’s a young American girl in Uganda who has adopted 14 (at last count, I think) children and has founded an organization that feeds hundreds more. She’s 19 (may have turned 20 since this all started) years old and while I can’t cross the globe to help her, I want to see what I can do about getting her story into more places than just her blog, in an effort to increase the scope of what she can do for the children she meets, and feeds, and nurses, on a daily basis.
I’d put the link to her blog here but my computer is dead and I can’t find it.
Next week I’ll be painting my friend’s house. She’s been in a wheelchair for the last 20 or so years from a bizarre accident when a bell tower, at a bible camp, collapsed on her leaving her without the use of her legs.
Judy lives close to us. I walk by her house daily on my routine dog walk. Last fall I noticed her house desparately needed painting and pointed it out to her. “Somebody noticed!!” She exclaimed.
So next week, a few of us will set aside a couple of days to spruce up her place. In the end I don’t think it is the work that has touched her as the fact that someone noticed.
It is not my nature to notice things, but when you see the meaningful impact, it encourages me to attend more deeply to things and folks around.
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