It was always in motion.
We are custodians of the tender moments when our paths meet beauty. It rarely announces itself. We claim it as ours, though we often cannot explain why it moved us in the first place. We think we love beauty itself, but what unsettles us most is the moment we realize it will not stay.
In Japanese culture, there are over forty varieties of red — shades we might casually call scarlet, crimson, or rose — each carrying its own name: Beniiro, Hi-iro, Jinzamomi, Momo-iro. Then the red-browns: Akani, Azuki-iro, Shuan. The names that catch my eye may not be the ones that arrest yours. Each selection is small and private, yet revealing. What we reach toward says something about what we are prepared to notice. Beauty does not impose itself; it waits to be distinguished.
In Persian mythology, the Homa is a bird said to fly so high it never touches the earth. As it ascends, its shadow below thins and softens, until the line between light and shade nearly dissolves. And yet legend holds that whoever the Homa’s shadow falls upon is blessed with fortune and kingship. The beauty here is not in what is clearly seen, but in what barely reaches us at all. Meaning gathers at the edges of perception.
When we admire a fully bloomed flower, we rarely acknowledge that it is already in departure to the very soil it was born from. The bloom is not an interruption of decay but a phase within it. A weathered face is not a ruined one; alteration is not accusation. Nature does not apologize. It turns. It is we who resist it.
We mourn beauty not because it departs, but because its departure unsettles the illusion that it belonged to us. Time does not betray. It proceeds. Rivers do not apologize for smoothing stones at the shore. What unsettles us is not the fading itself, but the recognition that we mistook movement for stability.
We fight visible fading fiercely — as though time were obligated to consult us.
The biological fading is inevitable — the skin thins, posture shifts, the light behind the eyes alters. It is visible, measurable. We can photograph it and hold it beside earlier versions of ourselves like two drafts of the same letter.
The other fading is quieter. It happens when curiosity calcifies into opinion, when wonder hardens into habit, when we stop asking certain questions because we believe we already know the answers. No mirror records it. No image marks the before and after. A person may appear unchanged for decades and never notice the surrender — the quiet loss of the openness that once made life vivid. That loss rarely feels like loss.
We fight what time will take and overlook what only we can tend.
Perhaps beauty intensifies where attention rests — in the willingness to remain permeable, to let it move without trying to keep it. Attention does not freeze beauty; it accompanies it. When perception narrows, beauty does not necessarily disappear. We simply stop recognizing it.
The luminous is not always livable.
Beauty never asked to be forever. The promise of permanence was ours, not its own. What fades reveals what was never really there — the assurance of permanence. What was conditional, we mistook for timeless. Beauty kept its nature. We misread it — and insisted it remain.