I was supposed to go to a sourdough class this morning, but I decided not to go.

My stomach wasn’t feeling great, but if I’m honest, that wasn’t the real reason. I would like to perfect my sourdough-making skills, but that morning I wanted quiet more than I wanted to spend the day learning about sourdough in a room full of people acting like we were all one loaf away from living off-grid.

So here I sit with my computer, which, truthfully, is exactly where I want to be.

My husband is away visiting family, and I have the whole glorious day to myself.

I started the morning by loafing for a while on my phone. I don’t particularly like doing that. I think it squashes creativity and makes the mind wander, and not in a good way.

Eventually, I pulled myself away from the screen, which took more effort than I care to admit, and made my way to the sunroom.

The light in there is always perfect.

I opened the windows and let the sounds of the woods become the background music to my thirty-minute intuitive yoga practice. Birds chirped while the wind moved through the trees, sometimes in powerful gusts and other times almost like a whisper.

For the past few mornings, I’ve found myself fascinated by a squirrel outside the sunroom windows, watching him build and refresh his nest high in the boughs of the trees. That morning, though, he was nowhere to be seen. Only the nest remained, swaying gently while the woods carried on around it.

By the time I finished, I felt deeply grateful. Grateful for the beauty of the morning and for a God who would think to create all of this for ordinary people like us.

There is something humbling about realizing how much beauty exists around us every single day, whether we pause long enough to notice it or not.

There is something humbling about realizing how much beauty exists around us every single day, whether we pause long enough to notice it or not.

Then I did something I almost never do.

I took a messy-haired, no-makeup selfie fresh from yoga, my face slightly flushed and slightly wrinkled from my fifty-one years on the planet.

The old version of me would have deleted the image immediately, but the new version of me, for the very first time, saw the beauty. Not just the beauty of the face, but the beauty of the life behind the wrinkles and imperfections.

It was a strange experience.

I have never thought of myself as beautiful, but lately I have been feeling a new kind of confidence.

When I look back at photographs of myself in my twenties and thirties, I can see now how truly beautiful I was then. It is so strange that women are often like that.

We don’t see our own radiance until we are much older and the radiance has given way to something deeper and more meaningful.

It is no longer the surface-level beauty that comes with glowing skin and ceaseless collagen. Instead, it becomes beauty with a soul.

The beauty that comes from actually living a life cannot be replicated with creams, Botox, fillers, or all the other nonsense women are sold to keep us chasing youth instead of appreciating the beauty age can bring.

Nothing is more beautiful than the soul-deep glow of a woman past the age of forty.

Nothing is more beautiful than the soul-deep glow of a woman past the age of forty.

I am proud to say I think I finally have it. I see it now, and I am grateful for it.

Lately, I just feel different somehow. Lighter. More comfortable in my own life.

I’ve felt drawn to things that make me slow down and pay attention again. Writing more. Moving my body. Sitting quietly in the sunroom with the windows open. Paying attention to the life right in front of me instead of rushing through my days distracted by noise and screens.

Maybe that is what this season of life is teaching me. That beauty was always there if I slowed down enough to notice it. In the wrinkles and imperfections I used to criticize. In the quiet mornings. In the trees outside my windows. And in the woman looking back at me from the photograph.

I just couldn’t see it before.