I came across this most excellent artist, Craww. And I just love his work. Isn’t it amazing?

This makes me want to fly away, to be free from all the gravity grounding me to a reality that is a skosh too harsh right now. It inspires me to cut paper wings and fashion them after all that is light and bearable. I wish to float on the breath of love too far from home.

I’m like a pinata and after all who came before you had their swings at me, yours was the winning one. You broke me open and everything within me is yours for the taking.

I think it always was.

Made a wrong turn, once or twice
Dug my way out, blood and fire
Bad decisions, that’s alright
Welcome to my silly life
Mistreated, misplaced, misunderstood
Miss ‘No way, it’s all good’, it didn’t slow me down
Mistaken, always second guessing, underestimated
Look, I’m still around

Pretty pretty please,
Don’t you ever ever feel
Like you’re less than,
Less than perfect
Pretty pretty please,
If you ever, ever feel
Like you’re nothing
You’r are perfect to me!

You’re so mean,
When you talk about yourself,
You were wrong!
Change the voices in your head,
Make them like you, instead!
So complicated, look happy, you’ll make it!
Filled with so much hatred…such a tired game
It’s enough! I’ve done all I can think of
Chased down all my demons, I’ve seen you do the same

Oh, pretty pretty please,
Don’t you ever ever feel
Like you’re less than,
Less than perfect
Pretty pretty please,
If you ever ever feel like you’re nothing
You are perfect to me.

The whole world’s scared so I swallow the fear
The only thing I should be drinking is an ice cold beer
So cool in line, and we try try try, but we try too hard and it’s a waste of my time
Done looking for the critics, cause they’re everywhere
They don’t like my jeans, they don’t get my hair
Exchange ourselves, and we do it all the time
Why do we do that? Why do I do that?

Why do I do that..?

Yeah, oh, oh baby, pretty baby..!
Pretty pretty please, don’t you ever ever feel
Like you’re less than,
Less than perfect
Pretty pretty please, if you ever ever feel
Like you’re nothing, you are perfect to me
You’re perfect, you’re perfect to me!
Pretty pretty please, if you ever ever feel like you’re nothing
You are perfect to me…

(dare until a flower,
understanding ceaselessly sunlight
open what thousandth why and
discover laughing)

- e. e. cummings, be of love (a little)

We are all beautiful. It is in the looking. It is in the seeing. I suppose it is about which angle we choose to see. Isn’t it ironic how we so rarely choose to see ourself in a way that beauty can recognized or appreciated. We are perhaps not able to get the right perspective about ourselves… for good reason. It helps us continue to grow and polish ourselves… If we were to catch the exact angle where our own beauty shined brightest, would we become like Narcissus lost in that one reflection? That one view… Peering into the darkness only to see one part of ourselves.

You are right. We should focus on just being, whoever we are but even that is ethereal and we can but breathe in every moment and know that life is something of a mystery.

You are beautiful. We are all beautiful. Life is beautiful if only we can get the right angle, or open our eyes and that is so much more of a task for good reason as well. Like Narcissus or Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When surrounded with ONLY beauty one becomes something different, something ugly. Transforms to be unique. When those of us who see things in all their colors, darkness, light, and every shade in between… We create a palette that colors the world more real. And this is a new kind of beauty. Something many cannot see.

Its in the pregnant pause of a busy mind that often cannot think of that witty retort in time but just a moment too late. Its in the tears of self doubt. Its in the aggravation of the inconvenient. In the misstep. In the tummy pouch, ten pounds past perfect. In the split ends and the frayed mistakes. Its in the deep grooves lined on your face like battle wounds from life. It is in the stress-induced rash displayed upon your face to read… I am struggling. It is in the mispronounced author’s name.

So perhaps you don’t see it in yourself. And I do not in myself but that leaves us searching for and finding it in everything else. And isn’t that a more solid beauty?

I wonder where else we can see beauty outside the box. If beauty can be redefined, then I have hope…

You, my sun.

Hours shift you anxious urging me ablaze into my day. Reluctant I lumber down the hall beckoning you like moths. Story the whole of everything grooved permanent in my hands, read me like a favorite book again and again. And watch spellbound my departure culling your return.

Open wide the window and summon sweet the chickadee’s song drift us intoxicated. Swoop in the crow to eat you whole and darkness rains upon me once again. The night terrorizes me silent frozen statue I will not move forgotten. Petrified dreams bronzed curls rise above my head spiraling crown and mimic you.

You, my sun.

Have you ever stopped everything and just sat down refusing to move completely disregarding the inertia of things and people around you urging you desperately to move in some direction? I have done this in my life, in every single way, recently. I am all but holding my breath to not move in the slightest way just to avoid doing the wrong thing. I am paralyzed by a lack of will to move on, even if it is all that I am supposed to do, some act of willful defiance within refuses to allow me to budge. I spent far too much time picking my every emotional wound trying to goad myself onto a new path and I find my fingernails littered with bloodied thoughts of useless futility. I shall not move on, not today.

I’ve cried so many tears my eyes have evaporated and I no longer see who I am anymore. I can but make out a vague recollection of pieces of who I once was and I disappear into this unmovable version of me and grow thick an alabaster column cementing me to a statue of a memory.

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

We are all composed of every road we’ve chosen, every place we’ve been, every person we’ve encountered. Every choice. Every thought. Every moment. And we are all the better, or the worse, for each little thing. I wonder how I will affect those I encounter. How my thoughts, my words, my actions will change the course of someone else’s life or my own. I wonder if I tell those I love how much they mean to me in a way they can fully comprehend. I wonder if we can revisit a moment in time and feel it as vividly as we did then AND see it differently. If it is possible to love with roots so deep they hold us steady in the harshest of weather and have that love flourish for a lifetime. I wonder if I plant enough seeds if I will leave behind a garden or if I will forget to tend to one and leave behind a weed that grows thick over infinite possibilities, shutting doors or overgrowing paths I could have taken? I hope I leave this world a little bit (or a lot) better than I came into it. And I hope I leave more flourishing than dead within the garden.

I have suffered gut-wrenching loss but I have loved in ways epic love stories are composed. I have been so sick I thought I’d die but I have lived so well in the moment that I have no regrets. I have wept so hard I couldn’t catch my breath and doubted whether I would ever stop but I have laughed just as hard but twice as much. I have been fortunate in this life and I try to remind myself of this every day. In ways most people fail to see. I measure my life, my success in love, in family, in friends, in the smiles of every day strangers. I am a sum total of all my experiences and yet I awake anew every single day and I choose who I will be in this world today. Like we all do. And today, I choose to be. Whatever that may consist of today… I choose to be.