“Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.”
~Stendhal
So
if we assume nature promises beauty,
and beauty promises happiness,
then by the transitive property,
nature promises happiness.
This means happiness is all around us,
now it’s only a matter of looking at it like that.
Spectacular photos by Jane Thomas:
The focus of this meditation is that sometimes I wonder if it can be detrimental to love beauty too much, to indulge in it excessively, to search for beauty in things that may not be beautiful at all…is this my optimism, naivety, or sheer ignorance?
New works by my favorite Mars1:
For starters, I wonder what would happen if you just avoided things that you didn’t find beautiful. For me, that would be horror movies (also known as DEATH), the news, economics, anything useful in the “real world”, etc. I might just lose sight of reality, in my search for beauty, and forget that a darkness even exists.
I still can’t tell whether or not this Utopia is where one would want to be though…
For the most part, I’m not trying to lose sight of reality, and after all, I’m not even sure if beauty can exist without darkness.
It only seems logical that you need to have both, in order to know that either exists. The recognition of the existence of darkness allows us to appreciate when life shows us something truly brilliant.
In my opinion, the mere possibility that we will all eventually succumb to an eternal darkness
should motivate people to save their lives only for what is beautiful, while we still have light to illuminate the world’s magnificent complexities.
Focusing on anything else would simply be a waste of time.
What I’ve concluded just might be that as long as we are aware of the presence of darkness, we should be able to see beauty even more, everywhere, in anything and everything that signifies LIFE. It’s not ignorance. It’s okay.
Richard Gray
On a lighter note, my birthday is coming up on December 6th, and for dinner we’re going out to a Mexican place like last year. We’ve decided each roommate will buy me a margarita (right guys?)
The reason I want to go to a Mexican dinner is because of the lack of Mexican food in Canada as a whole. No Taco Bell, no Chipotle, no one to practice Spanish with. It’s one of the few parts of America I truly miss, and I’m sure other Americans would be upset if queso and salsa disappeared from their lives too:
I spend too much time cracking up at pictures online.
There’s a neighborhood cat that likes to meow outside my windowsill until I open the back door for him. When I let him in from the cold, all he wants to do is cuddle. He sometimes wanders to other parts of the house, but when I put dubstep on, he comes back. Perfect man? Just might have to do for now.