I seek beauty. In my younger days, I sought happiness all unknowing that it will shift down into loneliness or desperation. Lured by a culture taught to pursue happy at all costs. That to be happy is life’s purpose. Now, as I come out of a deep and abiding sadness whose cause, the thought of, these years later still leaves me almost shattered… Now I seek beauty, from the turning of a leaf to the bone deep rage of the storm. In soft lips seen across a room and in the slow deloreous decay of a city seeking both its roots and its future. These glimpses of beauty bring joy and even the elusive happy. But it is the cause I seek not the results.

You can’t be just one thing and survive this life. and you rationalists will say that no one survives this life. well, while correct that death takes us all, there is a worse fate for many of us. To walk from day to day, living for the next thing, the next time, for some promised future when it will be better, when you can rest, or do as you desire, or be with the person you love. I see so many of us with that affliction. And it’s not that those lives are necessarily bad. Many of them are happy. Maybe it’s because I’m seeing it from a distance but there seems to be missing in many the spark, the piece of themselves that they could be, if they took a single step outside and saw what was possible. You plan for the future because it is necessary, but you live now, in the moment. You plan, set the plan in place, then let it go. You plan for as many possibilities as you can imagine then let those go as well and trust that you are capable of adapting well enough that you will survive. You all have it in you to be…so much more…; I wish more people grasped that and walked sideways into their future.