I have been spending a fair bit of time processing the beauty of people. Suppose I still am, so I won't tell you about all that just now. I am caught between scents, but unlike prey, I am not confused. I am just... filled.
So instead of talking about people, I thought I'd show you a bit of the beauty here in Bucharest right now, instead.
I used to have trouble focusing on the now and seeing what's right in front of me. I don't have that now, but one of the cool 'tricks' I discovered when I felt the world slipping away from me was using my camera lens. So that my eyes could focus on the 'real'.
When you spend so much time inside your head playing with the shadows, it can become hard to see what's in this dimension. Cameras help. Finding tasks in the real world, even if they're silly, nonsense tasks helps.
Gathering fallen leaves is another great 'trick'. All tasks that necessitate looking for something.
...sometimes, the something insists on finding you. This little guy fell on me. :)
We like to say the leaves are turning in this season, but that implies they are changing color the way you change a shirt. They're not. Rather, the leaves were all these beautiful orange, yellow, red, brown shades always. So if we're continuing the clothing analogy, it's them taking off the shirt (chlorophyll) to reveal the undershirt.
Autumn is traditionally a season of death. Not the final, burial dead of winterscape, rather the long and odd process of dying. What's interesting to me and what I try to remember when I see a bare branch is this little tidbit about leaves.
That while death and the passage of time towards it are inevitable, they need not be terrible. That you can grow and not blossom, perhaps the blossoming has ended. But perhaps, if you live your life openly and with truth as a core tenet, you might start stripping off the shades of yourself that are no longer helpful.
I kinda like this thought that the older you get, the closer to the end you come, the more you begin to reveal these nuances and breathtaking shades of your self.
(and sometimes, you gotta stop waxing poetic to admire the dying of the light.)
Would it be fair to argue that these "dying" shades of leaves are their truer selves? I don't know. Seems a bit insistent to me, a bit trying to mold it to our own little fearful human hearts.
Likewise, I don't think it would be fair to claim that we humans "reveal" more of our true selves as we get older. I mean those of us with interest and intention in doing so. Some end up closing themselves more and more away as they age, and it's a terrible tragedy.
But again, I don't think we're revealing. I think the task is also in creating, in readjusting, in reordering what is inside you that makes you. Maybe you strip away the things that made you beautiful when you were young to find you're also beautiful now, but with different pigment. And here we've arrived, inevitably, to the beauty of human
being.
It seems fair. There's so bloody much of it.
