Beauty

We train our focus on beauty here or there—this poem, that architecture—because it is easier than bearing witness to our own story. We begin to gravitate not toward beauty but toward illusion. In this state, you are not approaching what you seek. You are running from your own face. But this is not the way of wonder. Wonder requires a person not to

Perhaps you’ve known that person who devours beauty as if it belongs to them. It is a possessive wonder. It eats not to delight but to collect, trade, and boast. It consumes beauty to grow in ego, not in love. It climbs mountains to gain ownership, not to gain freedom.