#Lifeisbeautiful

I strive to capture the beauty that so many of us miss while playing out our daily routine.  Whether it’s a mountain, a lake, a child’s laugh, a mother’s tiger stripes, a bird of prey, the wrinkles of age, a crow on the beach, a staged apocalyptic card game, or a rusted out pinto.  There is beauty all around us, even in the most unlikely of places.  There is beauty in the darkest of storms, if you have the willingness to look for it.

Our society has evolved in such a way that we spend most our lives as “zombies asleep at the wheel”.  Going through life on autopilot: wakeup, go to work, come home, sleep, repeat.  Its comfortable, it’s what we know, it’s what’s safe.   However, we miss a great deal of amazing moments of beauty around us.

"Still, she was doing her best, struggling to think like a survivor. When she found that the seaweed with which they’d covered themselves sustained a vast number of tiny creatures, “I was dazzled by the life it supported…an entire world, self-sufficient and complete.” To be open to the world in which you find yourself, to be able to experience wonder at its magnificence, is to begin to admit its reality and adapt to it. Be here now. It is to place yourself in relation to it, to say: Before I came here, the world was as it is now; after I am gone, it will be that way still. To experience wonder is to know this truth: The world won’t adapt to me. I must adapt to it. To experience humility is the true survivor’s correct response to catastrophe. A survival emergency is a Rorschach test. It will quickly tell you who you are."
 

-Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why