and he called it the lilies and urine principle. in the darkest and most abject of places, there is still beauty, and the idea that beauty is not something that arises from everything being perfect and symmetrical and orderly and straight. beauty is the thing that manages to grow in the cracks in the sidewalk, and manages to struggle out between the buildings and between the barbed wire. my earliest sense of being aware of a world much bigger than my six-year-old reality came from books. and i lived and breathed and ate those books. and i was acutely sensitive to the themes of loss and change and suffering. i remember when i was six years old writing a poem about the golden years are passing by in the winds that whistle. i had this real sense that nothing lasts, and a real sadness about that. a real sense of wanting, wanting everything to be golden and stay golden, and it didn't work like that. and i was also very sensitive to the land around me, and i grew up in a region that was rapidly being developed, and where what used to be h