every shade of feels

We all pass through life wondering about love. Some find it and some can’t and yet we are all connected through it. Maybe Johnny Depp sums it up best at the end of Don Juan de Marco when he says: 

There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. 

What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for?

The answer to each is the same. 

Only Love.

But Love is not just love, is it? Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about, those we hold in high regard. Love can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor, and “loaded with promises and commitments” that we may or may not want or keep. 

At the end of the day, the best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.

Still most of us are afraid of it or at least we think we are. I think we aren’t afraid of love particularly. We are afraid of all the junk we’ve attached to love. And we have convinced ourselves that by being cautious with our feelings, by withholding them or withholding one tiny word from the people we actually love or are in love with might shield us from that junk. But it won’t.

After all we are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright—to elucidate the nature of our feelings and affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.

A proclamation of love is not inherently “loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.” The terms you agree to in any given relationship are connected to, but not defined by, whether you’ve said “I love you” or not. “I love you” can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful and I’m going to do everything in my power to be your partner for the rest of my life. It can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful but I’m in transition right now, so let’s go easy on the promises and take it as it comes. It can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful but I’m not interested in a commitment with you, now or probably ever, no matter how groovy or beautiful you continue to be. 

The point is we get to say it. We get to define the terms of your life. We get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of our feelings for other people. 

SO DO IT!

Be vocal about love, be brave, be bold. Just do it. Doing so will free you from the tense tangle that withholding weaves, because in the end withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small hearted and it makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel. So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy is for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word “love” to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will and it will be easy.

We are all going to die, so let’s do it with love in our hearts and love in our lives.

It might be genuinely mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering and i promise you it will be worth it.

photography by li hui

a salute

Last night I realized that loving the wrong person is the easiest way to kill your self-esteem and so I decided to walk away from the person that sparked this realization. And i realized something else. I realized, that sometimes walking away has nothing to do with weakness, but everything to do with strength. We walk away not because we want others to realize our worth and value, but because we finally realize our own.

so let me say this:

To everybody who has loved someone who didn’t deserve them, I salute you for your very act of loving. For having the strength to love the people who can’t love you the way you deserve to be loved. I salute you because even when it hurts like nothing else, you still choose to stay. I salute you for you believing in these people and the the idea that people can change. That maybe one day, they would realize just how important you are. That one morning, they will see all your efforts and appreciate them. 

That a time will come when they will take into consideration all the emotions you invested in them. The battles you fought for them. That one special moment, they would simply decide to reciprocate the love you deserve. I salute you for giving so much more than what you are receiving. I salute you, because despite all the hurt and hardship you managed to survive. I salute you because no matter how wounded your soul is, no matter how damaged your heart is, you always choose love. You always choose to learn, forgive and move forward. You still choose to accept the pain, overcome it and let go.

I salute you because after all, love is never easy. Love can be scary. Love can be torture. Love can be distasteful. But still you choose to see love for all its fascinating attributes. You still choose to love, and not just love the easy people, or the people who can give you the world. You didn’t love the right people, you loved all the wrong ones and that reflects nothing but total absolut bravery. 

photography by nima elm and me.

Finding Reason

There is a theory which states that if anyone ever discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrere and inexplicable. My theory is that this has already happened. How else could one explain the weird, yet wonderful and random thing that life on this planet is most days. 

Life is melancholy and life is joy. It’s chaotic and peaceful. It’s full of meaning yet some days feel empty and pointless. Life is a whole dimension of color-pallets yet what seems to matter is the space between the perceptible. Life is intense and it is all kinds of moments, not just the happy ones. Even though the happy ones are like the cherry on top of this absurd swirl. 

In fact, wo don’t recognize the happiest moments of our lives as we are living them. It may well be that in a moment of joy we might truly believe that we are living that golden instant „now“, but whatever we say, in part of our hearts we still believe in the certainty of happier moments to come. Actually giving a moment value and purpose is something that happens in retrospect and with perspective.

This particular prospect has always been something that made me especially nostalgic caused by the feeling of not having enjoyed specific moments enough, not having lived them to the fullest. After all it’s in the nature of moments, that they pass away in a heartbeat. 

The only way to catch these little heartbeats of happiness are photographs and memories. Actually photographs are nothing more then preserved memories. That is what I like about them. Sometimes I wish that photographs were physical places you could crawl inside to go back. Hide in them and experience a perfect moment one more time. Unfortunately it’s this impossibility that makes moments so unique and perfect after all. They are beautiful, because they are transitory. Just like life. Just like us.

The universe is not made of atoms, it’s made stories, moments and the very tender membrane of emotions that’s stretched between us, that connects everything and everyone. 

So maybe that’s what everything is about. Not discovering the reason why, but being the reason. Being your own legitimation, that you do exist in this time a space, that you exist in this universe. How random and absurd and hopeless it may seem somedays.

photography by n.guan and me.

Scar(r)ed

Being scared ist caused mostly by thinking. That’s what I’ve learned. Thinking of what could go wrong, what has gone wrong before and thinking of old scars. Scars in their nature remind us of moments we have fallen or failed. Moments we have been hurt. And weirdly enough - or for evolutionary reasons - those moments stick with us, just like the scars. Visible and hidden. And even worse those scars are restraining us, holding us back. They remind us to be careful or to not even try, because after all it has gone wrong before and why should this time be any different? The memory of the pain is just too present.The fact is: we think nothing we want ever turns out quite the way we want it. Love or ambition, children or projects, and we go from disappointment to disappointment, from hope to denial, from expectation to surrender. As we grow older, we start to think, that what is wrong is us and our longing. So we believe or come to believe, that hope is our misconception, aspiration our mistake and expectation our error.If we shift our perspective a little, we can see that scars are so much more than just a reminder of pain and defeat. They are testimonies of survival, marks of a continuation. The actual evidence that something bad and hurtful can happen to you without destroying you. You may have fallen,you may have been hurt, injured and knocked to your knees; but you healed. With time and care. And isn’t that what life is about? Not avoiding yourself and the obstacles you have to face, but taking them head first, step by step and learning from them instead of hiding from them. 

If I leave this life, i wanna leave it scarred as fuck, not scared as hell.

Most things, once you have conquered them, become yours for ever. They become part of who you are and they can’t destroy you anymore.
Wear your scars like crowns and be proud that you survived. Let your insecurities become jewels that make you shine. They are part of who you are and always keep in mind what Yoda said: 

 

photography by aurnaud ele and me