tis a beauty

I toss high level words around a lot. Words like Grace, Beauty, Change, words that can mean a lot of things or mean absolutely nothing. I do it sometimes to keep things simple, and I do it sometimes to be vague enough so I can say something without saying too much. This is the interweb after all, one has to know the rules and boundaries.

But definitions are ok sometimes, even for a circle-goer like yourstruly.

I've had this phrase on the Facebooker for the last year that says "stumbling into awkwardness, stumbling into beauty". Truth, when I wrote it, like often when I write things, it wasn't a super thought-out statement, it just came from somewhere and decided it wanted to be written. So I let it. But what.

Well, there's the issue of Beauty. To me beauty is honest. It's a makeup-bare face, or a man's face not cleanly shaven, it's something that rusted naturally outside in the rain, flowers on the verge of dying, it's torn and tattered books, banged up wood, belly laughing, mutual silence, it's scuffed shoes, weeds, honest to goodness industrial buildings, broken things, wrinkled skin, scars, a proper hug, good conversation.

It's a nearly unending list of things with one thing in common: they're not hiding what they really are.

So Beauty is honesty ... and then there's the awkward. Because the thing about honesty is that it can be really rather discomfiting. It's often not easy. It feels like it might hurt us, or hurt someone else. And sometimes, looking at something As Is, it can seem ugly, and wrong, and weird, at first glance. But have you ever sat with something like that, looked at it long enough and realized that there was actually something engaging, maybe even breathtaking about it? Or stumbled into an uncomfortable conversation and realized that the end result, whatever it was, was actually something close to comfort?

It's often through the awkward that we reach honesty and it's always through the honest that we reach beauty.

Blame the artist in me, but while I duck my head from discomfort as much as anyone else, I'm learning to be ok with it, to stumble into it if nothing else ... because one thing I'm certain of, I'll never stop whispering that Beauty, however hard to reach, is indeed something worth beholding.

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Went "running" this morning. Haven't ran for over a month. My back felt good, which was good news, better than good news. The rest of me however? Lord almighty, the rest of me has rapidly gotten reacquainted with inactivity and loudly protested the push back towards strength again.

I don't relish feeling weak and unable to do something. And I certainly don't relish the feeling of gravity pulling my body down like a ten tonne weight. Nor the feeling that months of hard (enjoyable but hard) work have been negated.

Changes. Starting with the running, of course, and with letting go of Beer. Ouch. It's summer, that almost equates to insanity. But alas. Its just beer. Surely there is an alternative.

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Not certain why, maybe I've had a hankering for vocal harmony and singing along lately, but this has been popping up repeatedly on iTunes:



And a couple contrasting somethings I saw on an alley-walk yesterday:





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Peace all,
t.