Of beauty

A principle.

A collector of beautiful things.

But beauty—
it doesn’t ask for anything.
Not your words.
Not your witness.
Not even your understanding.

It simply is.

The vase on the shelf,
the curve of a brushstroke,
the light through a window at 7am —
they exist complete.
Whole before you arrived.
Whole after you leave.

Praise changes nothing.

You can speak of beauty,
catalogue it,
frame it in language—
but the thing itself remains untouched.
What it was, it still is.

And people—

I think we are like this too.

Living as art.
Not performance art,
but the quiet kind.
The kind that exists whether anyone notices it or not.

I don’t exist for applause.
I don’t exist to be understood.

I exist to be present.
To share that presence.
To let others bask, if they choose,
in what is already here.

This is enough.

Beauty is beautiful in itself.

I am enough, just by being.

And that— that is everything.

— Lisa T., Collector of beautiful things