How to Find Beauty When Hope Is Hard to Locate

Lessons from an olive orchard

I spent a day in an orchard earlier this week, napping beneath an olive tree and a pomegranate tree as a breeze fussed the leaves. The sky was a gentle, almost bashful blue with a few bright, threadbare clouds. It was the kind of place that seemed to have forgotten the noise of the world—and for a moment, I did too. The word bower came to mind, definitively: a pleasant, shady place under the trees.

I was in Gabès, the maritime oasis in southern Tunisia where my father grew up, where I spent many summers as a child, and where much of my family still lives. Along with fifty others, I’d been invited by the French-Tunisian artist eL Seed, whose family is also from Gabès, to celebrate the olive harvest and share a meal. In the orchard, a woman was making tabouna—Tunisian flatbread baked against the walls of a cylindrical oven. We dipped it into ricotta made from eL Seed’s family cow, drizzled with olive oil and honey. Then came l’agneau à la gargoulette—lamb, olives, fava beans, tomatoes, peppers, and turnips slow-cooked underground in sealed terracotta urns. When the stew is ready, the pots are unearthed and cracked open with a mallet, everyone claps, and the feast begins.

I’d been longing for just such a gathering. I hadn’t been to Tunisia in six long years. First the pandemic, then the return of leukemia kept me away. My second bone marrow transplant wiped out all my immunities, and I had to wait until I was fully revaccinated and strong enough to return. My parents and brother spent much of the last two years here, and it was hard to be away from them. I missed the landscape. My cousins. The easy back-and-forth of Arabic and French, that braided linguistic chaos that always feels like home. I even missed the way the heat conspires to slow you down, insisting you sit, sip mint tea with toasted pine nuts, stay awhile.

Getting here was no small feat—thirteen hours of flights in a face mask—and the steep hills of Sidi Bou Saïd, where my parents live, test me daily. And then there are Tunisia’s strict laws against marijuana, even medical marijuana, which I rely on to quiet chemo nausea and coax appetite. The penalty is a year in prison. Not exactly the kind of souvenir I had in mind, though it would make one hell of a story.

So that’s how I found myself in this bower of olive and pomegranate trees. After the ricotta and tabouna, I felt the familiar waves of nausea: the clamminess, the shakiness. I needed to lie down, so I wandered just far enough to still hear the laughter and clinking glasses but be out of sight. Above me, the branches were heavy with olives, and directly overhead, a single pomegranate glowed.

Despite the discomfort, I was blissfully content. My body was struggling, but everything else—light, air, fruit—was whole. I felt as subsumed by beauty as I could ever wish to be. Lying there, I thought of my first long hospitalization, at twenty-two—the shock of finding myself confined to that room, unable even to open a window. As the days blurred into weeks and the biopsy results kept coming back wrong, I felt suffocated by the snarl of tubes and beeping IV monitors and the harsh fluorescent light. I was starved for rain, for wind, for anything alive. Hope was hard to locate.

I used to be all-or-nothing about my health: if I didn’t feel well, I went straight home to bed, shut the door, disappeared. But after a while I realized I didn’t want to live inside that confinement, inside the parentheses of illness. So I started venturing out anyway, learning how to make a makeshift nest wherever I was. More times than I can count on this trip, I’ve pulled up somewhere and stayed in the car for twenty minutes, just breathing until the world steadied again. And then, almost always, something revealed itself: a stray cat sunbathing in a perfect coil, a party of finches in a jasmine bush, a radiant kilim in a shop window saturated in sunlight.

It’s become its own kind of creative practice—how to find beauty inside constraint, and maybe, sometimes, because of it.

I’m reminded of something my late friend Lisa Bonchek Adams used to say—a line I’ve shared here before and will probably share again until the end of time, as it’s become a kind of daily prayer for me: “Find a bit of beauty in the world today. Share it. If you can’t find it, create it. Some days this may be hard to do.”

Some days, it is. But not that day in Gabès, lying beneath the olive and pomegranate trees, watching the leaves and the sky and the swollen fruit above me. Beauty found me exactly where I’d had to stop—and stayed long enough to make itself known.

Now I’d like to introduce you to today’s guest contributor—or reintroduce her, as she’s written for us before: Jessica Slice. The author of Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World, Jessica writes powerfully about the experience of disability. Her essay “Comfort & Care” is no exception. It gives us permission to indulge in something soft, soothing, and beautiful, and to create a perfect nest for yourself.

I hope this week you find your own version of that orchard—a corner of quiet, a moment of reprieve, a small mercy of beauty. We make these places for one another simply by noticing them, and by sharing what we see.

Some Items of Note—

• To celebrate the arrival of The Alchemy Journal, on November 12, 2025 from 7–8pm ET, I’m hosting The Alchemy Games: An Evening of Unconventional Journaling with John and Hank Green, the iconic brothers who built a whole universe of curiosity and compassion. To join us, simply pre-order The Alchemy Journal from your favorite bookstore and enter your confirmation or receipt number when you register.

• Nashville friends, I’m coming for a visit! On November 20, 2025, at 6:30pm CT, at the Montgomery Bell Academy, I’ll be taking the stage with the extraordinary Ann Patchett—another dream dinner guest!—to talk about all things alchemy. Seating is limited so get your tickets now!

Johannes Vermeer, Young Girl with a Lute (1662)

Prompt 357. Comfort & Care by Jessica Slice

I needed a power wheelchair for seven years before I got one. When I stopped being able to walk or stand for more than a minute in 2011, I shrunk my life to match my body’s needs. At some point, as the shame about my new body sloughed off, I realized that with a wheelchair, I could do more. Maybe my body wasn’t inadequate; maybe it was simply not accommodated.

I needed an accessible house for fourteen years before I got one. For years, I was trapped for most of the day in whichever room I set up camp. Most often, it was the primary bedroom, where my adjustable bed works for my body’s legion of demands. I have settled for facsimiles of meaningful moments, facetiming my daughter when she returns from school rather than meeting her at the door, hearing the echoes of my family’s laughter and the cries that only my husband was there to comfort. There have been tiny losses of dignity. I went a decade unable to access my own washer and dryer, unable to wash my special sweaters in the way I prefer. There are the scarier losses, too, like when we realized that the elevators in our high-rise apartment building shut down during emergencies and had to come up with an evacuation plan that involved me being carried out in a human-sized duffel bag. (We crossed our fingers that someone—my husband, a neighbor—would be available when the time came.)

My wheelchair lived in the garage or the front entry for years, stuck there because of stairways and narrow halls. I never considered that I could have a home I could fully access. Decades of ableism (which is, in part, the belief that a good life is for those whose bodies work) convinced me that I could fully use my house only if I could fully use my body. But even after we started trying to live somewhere with features that would work for me, I encountered a host of obstacles: cost, historical requirements, and stodgy neighbors.

Fourteen years after becoming disabled, in July of this year, a seeming miracle occurred: I moved into my first wheelchair-accessible home. We purchased a property in Toronto that is wide enough for the accommodations I need. We added a wheelchair lift in the front and another in the back. In the center of the house, an elevator with just enough room for me and my chair provides access to all three floors. I am now doing laundry. I am joining my family for breakfast. I was there last week when my toddler dropped a book on his toe and cried. I was there last night when my eight-year-old danced to Chappell Roan, wielding her “scepter” like Fred Astaire did a cane.

Sometimes, when I see these hulking metal structures in places where we might, say, put a dining room table, I’m embarrassed about what a fuss I’ve made. Is having me downstairs really worth the costly eyesores? But, other times, I see each one as evidence. That my comfort matters. That my presence is valuable. That a disabled or sick body does not deserve relegation or punishment. They are also a message to my two kids: in this family, there is no need, no pain, no weakness that renders you ineligible for inclusion. We will alter the whole house to ensure you belong.

Your prompt for the week:

What is a room in your house where the needs of your body conflict with the design of the space? How can you adjust your physical world to offer acceptance to your messy corporeal reality? Sure, adding an elevator is expensive, but what about a thrifted sofa instead of dining chairs? Or a duvet near the sofa for chilly nights? Or a soft rug by the kitchen sink for when your feet ache? How can we arrange our homes to serve as a reminder that we deserve comfort and care?

Today’s Contributor—

Jessica Slice is a disabled author, speaker, and essayist. She is the author of Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World, which explores the experiences of parenting with a disability. She is also the co-author of Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down, This is How We Play, This is How We Talk, and the forthcoming We Belong (with the late Judy Heumann). The author of the newsletter Whatever What Is, Jessica lives in her accessible house in Toronto with her husband, two kids, and two dogs.

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• Beholding the Body, an installment of my advice column Dear Susu, where a reader asked, “How do I make peace with the changes in my appearance?” and I meditate on about the impulse to cut your losses, simple pleasures, & Frida Kahlo

• On Asking for What We Need, a video replay of the Studio Visit with the brilliant Lena Dunham, where we talked about navigating limitations, letting go of shame, and the spiritual dividends of pain

• Love in the Time of Cancer, an installment of Dear Susu where my maman Anne Francey helped me answer a question from another caretaker—How do we keep going?—and reflected on the essential role of beauty in getting through

  

Pre-order the Alchemy Journal & join us for a special event!

✨ The Alchemy Journal arrives in just over a week—on November 11! And as a special thank you to anyone who pre-orders, on November 12, I’m hosting John and Hank Green for a virtual event called The Alchemy Games: An Evening of Unconventional Journaling. Reserve your copy and your spot today!