Stanley

“I am scared to even say this out loud, because I worry that having confessed this fragility, you now know where to punch. I know that if I am hit where I am earnest, I will never recover.

It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism and hide behind the great walls of irony and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it through the claude glass. But I want to be earnest, even if it's embarrassing.

The photographer Alec Soth has said, "to me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability. I would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it."

So I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out and I tell myself, "this doesn't look like a picture, and it doesn't look like a god. It is a sunset, and it is beautiful." And this whole thing you've been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect, that's bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this.”
― John Green