The beauty human hands can create
While the news delivers endless grief and outrage, remember the power of art
On March 23, my husband and I went to the Jazz Showcase in Chicago to see pianist Chuchito Valdes and his trio.
Jazz Showcase is a sultry, cozy venue, and we got there early enough to snare seats on one of the couches, which, paired with a glass of wine, is a lovely way to be out on a Saturday night without giving up the best thing about a Saturday night: drinking wine on a couch.
Valdes is the son of Chucho Valdes and the grandson of Bebo Valdes, both Cuban piano legends. He is a wizard of lightning-fast fingerwork and an absolute joy to behold. At one point, I found myself choking back tears that I wasn’t expecting to show up.
I thought.
Walking into the venue, my brain was filled with the layers of trauma and cynicism that build up in a couple of news cycles. Mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand. A Parkland student dead by suicide. A college cheating scandal. A president oozing bile from his Twitter-loving fingers, aiming it even at a dead war hero.
All set in motion too by human hands.
By the weekend’s end, an off-duty police officer had been killed in Chicago.
By March 25, a second Parkland survivor and the father of a Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victim were both dead from apparent suicides, more stark and dreadful reminders that school shootings — any shootings — rip holes in families and communities that never heal. Scab over, maybe. Heal, no.
I keep returning, in my mind, to Valdes’ hands.
I’m not trying to set up a simple binary: Human hands can wound or human hands can heal. Human hands — humans — are more complicated than that.
Some human hands create art that heals and inspires, wounds that cut to the core. You know the examples. We’ve been openly and heatedly discussing and debating them for more than a year.
What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that I’m finding it increasingly valuable — essential, even — to seek out beauty made by human hands. To remind myself of what we’re also capable. To show my kids. To remember, always, why we push for better, safer, more equitable communities. To remember what’s at stake.
I know people seek solace and grounding in nature. I know it’s tempting, and helpful, to escape humanity and its demands and excesses and destruction.
If you’ve got one at your disposal, I recommend staring at a lake. A river works too. Chicago, thankfully, is blessed with both.
But I also recommend hanging in there with humanity, looking for signs that all — most, in fact — is not lost. We do good. We are good.
The glass-bead tapestry made by the Huichol community graces the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. It takes up most of a wall. It’s a maze of brilliant, happy colors and stories woven together in square panel after square panel. My mom and I visited recently and stared, mesmerized, awed and reminded: Human hands did this.
Have you walked through the Wabash Arts Corridor in downtown Chicago? There are giant murals of blooming flowers and fanciful birds and a moose blowing a bubble out of bubble gum. (Here’s a map: wabasharts corridor.org/wac-map)
Have you read a Dave Eggers novel? “Heroes of the Frontier” was my most recent favorite. “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is my all-time favorite.
I have a friend in the hospital. Human hands are healing her, working in tandem to problem-solve and monitor and administer. That is its own kind of beauty.
Examples are everywhere. You’ll find them if you look. Maybe your own hands create beauty.
Maybe as we fumble our way through the daily (hourly?) mess of headlines and catastrophes and outrages, maybe human hands creating beauty can dot our landscapes and lead our way, like little lighthouses.
Poetry. Architecture. Your favorite TV show. Pie. A letter from a friend. A drawing by a child.
We are those things too. We make those things too.
Beauty doesn’t cancel out grief, but maybe beauty can guide us through it. And maybe it’s all around us, when we remember to seek it out and even, when we can, create it.
Join the Heidi Stevens Balancing Act Facebook group, where she continues the conversation around her columns and hosts occasional live chats.