It's hard to see beauty sometimes. Sometimes you simply give up on beauty.
Sometimes you might feel that beauty may not be enough.
The truth about beauty, though, is that it is enough. I think it is in
everything - even sadness. You have to embrace beauty to survive.
Someone, whose opinion I value quite a lot, said something the other day
that surprised me. She said: "What if happiness is a myth? What if
melancholy is our natural state?"
I was taken aback at first. The thought of never being happy scares me. But
then I spoke to someone over the weekend who gave me another piece of sage
advice. He said: "The worst thing you can do is to fight life. Sometimes
you just have to let life happen."
And perhaps that is the secret to being happy. Perhaps we need to accept the
melancholy and, while we are in it, embrace the beauty of it. Perhaps if we can
do that, then we can eventually move forward to find happiness. Perhaps if we
just let life happen, we will find happiness and the beauty which it entails.
Perhaps. Wab-Sabi
(This is quite funny considering what happened the last time I ate wasabi)
I don't know. I do know that I have found some more beautiful things I want
to share with you. Here are some more of the most beautiful things I will ever
want you to see.
****
This is Robby Novak aka Kid President.
Pep. talks. Beautiful.
*****
I have had a love affair with dance since I was a kid. I used to dance in
clubs as a teenager: it was stupid-running-man, Vanilla Ice-type stuff. I have
never trained. In my parents' house boys kicked balls and girls danced. Today
my love for dance is just as strong, but my knees aren't. I vascilate between
going to formal classes for fun and just admiring it from afar. Those of you
who love dance, or who have danced, will know what I mean when I say there is
an expression of beauty in movement which is unmatched by any other artform. I
have fallen a little in love with every Prima I have ever seen dancing. They
always seem mysterious and unattainable to me. Ethereal creatures, gracing us
with their presence, allowing us mere mortals a glimpse into the magical world
which they come from.
Dance. Beautiful.
*****
A side-effect of collecting beautiful things is that you begin to actively
search for them. The blessing in that, is that you end up discovering new
things and, in some cases, new artists. Creating beauty is the preserve of the
artist. Whatever form beauty takes, creating it is the conclusion of a creative
process which defines the life of an artist.
I found this the other day. It's been around for a while but, until
recently, I did not even know it existed. The net-result, the discovery of a
new artist. Watch it. It's beautiful.
At varsity I majored in photojournalism. Part of that was learning to print
in black and white and also studying the work of the world's greatest
photojournalists. Brazilian photographer Sebastião
Salgado caught my imagination. His study of human suffering - specifically
migrant workers - in beautiful black and white hit home for some reason. I also
found his hard, high contrast, printing aesthetically pleasing. It's how I
ended up printing (maybe because that is the way I live my life, black and
white - no grey).
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