That Vein of Beauty

A few years ago, I wasn’t feeling well and told a dear friend as much. She wrote back a beautiful, beautiful letter, and in it, among other, spectacularly loving things, she reminded me, “You have direct access to that vein of beauty that is fading ever faster from the sights of daily life.” Two years later, I wrote another dear friend a poem for his birthday and passed along the gift of that phrase calling him an “organic, electric, secret rock star, casually mythical, riding that vein of beauty that fuels enviable existence.”

In the complex expanse of human existence, there is running through the joys, irritations and boredom we all may experience, a beauty which takes many forms and which can be accessed “hundreds of ways.” That vein of beauty stirs my soul, and the project of finding people who know it, and figuring out how to connect others to it, is the deep joy of my life.

When beautiful moments resonate for me, I get chills down my arms and legs. It is happening more and more, and it’s a sign that I am closer to that vein than I ever have been before. This physical reaction is especially convincing when it happens in the middle of the afternoon at work because it’s easy to transcend ordinary existence in the wee hours of the day blogging about aesthetic experience listening, as I often do, to a mix of beautiful, contemporary music made for me by the first boy I ever loved, and who I still have the pleasure to know, even in this anonymous city.

When I’m writing here, each post is a chill of sorts that I’ve identified, worked out, verbalized and sometimes illustrated. From the outset, at 15 years old, my goal in this beauty project was to stay connected to those moments when I saw the beauty in the world clearly. I could not be happier that it is happening already, even through these first several months of blogging experiential aesthetics—merely the first stage of this work.