Taken By Beauty
When receiving becomes an act of creation.
There was a time when I felt tension between being and doing.
If I was fully present with my wife, with my daughter, with the trees outside my window, a part of my mind whispered, But you're not creating anything.
If I was writing, teaching, shaping something in the world, another part of me longed for stillness, for the spaciousness of simply receiving life.
I thought I had to choose. I thought there was a trade-off—either I was present with life, or I was making something of value.
But what I am discovering—what is unraveling me, opening me, undoing me—is that being and doing are not separate.
The tension was never real.
There is no line between receiving and creating. No gap between welcoming beauty and giving beauty form.
They are the same movement.
The same pulse.
The same dance.
Welcoming is Creation
I used to think creation was an act of effort—something I had to initiate, to shape, to pull from within me and place into the world.
But now, I see that creation is what naturally happens when I fully let life in.
Beauty is not something I make.
Beauty is something I surrender to.
And in that surrender—when I let the energy of beauty flood my body, move through my breath—something miraculous happens: it must move. It has to express itself.
It is not that I receive and then I create.
It is that receiving is the act of creation.
The inhale is the exhale.
The deeper I let in beauty—through the gaze of my daughter's bright eyes, the way my wife’s body presses into mine in lovemaking, the way she melts into my touch, surrendering to the pulse of us, the curve of a branch reaching toward the sky—the more beauty moves through me.
The more I feel it pulsing in my body, charging me like a battery, filling my skin with heat, until the energy is so full, so undeniable, that it overflows.
That overflow is the act of making love.
To Kiki. To the Feminine. To the world. To the work that wants to come through me.
Not because I should create. Not because I need to.
But because there is too much life inside me for it not to spill over.
The Dance of Being and Doing
It is all one motion: I breathe in beauty and it fills me so fully that it moves me into expression—whether in words, touch, presence, or creation. That expression ripples outward, shaping the world, and then the world reflects that beauty back to me, deepening my receiving.
The moment I drop fully into presence, I am already in creation.
The moment I surrender to beauty, I am already shaping reality.
There is no tension. There is only one endless, ecstatic dance.
The deeper I receive, the more I create.
The more I create, the deeper I receive.
This is not just the rhythm of art.
It is the rhythm of life itself.
The Experiment of Limitless Beauty
For most of my life, I've let beauty in—but only in short bursts. A glimpse. A touch. A moment before my mind reaches for something else.
But what happens when I push the limits of how much beauty I can hold?
What happens when I don't just glimpse beauty—but let it take me?
What happens when I stop bracing against the pleasure of being alive?
What happens if I spend an hour, a morning, a full day welcoming beauty with no agenda, no need to turn it into anything?
Not waiting for the next thing. Not needing it to become a piece of writing, a teaching, a post. Just breathing it in, deeper and deeper, until it becomes me.
And as I do, I can feel the infinite power gathering inside me—an energy so vast, so undeniable, that it pulses with the same creative force that births stars, that shapes worlds, that makes everything possible.
Because that's what's shifting now. I no longer need to make something beautiful.
Because I am the beauty.
And from that place, there is nothing I create that is not alive. There is nothing I touch that does not become an extension of the beauty moving through me.
A meal I cook. A moment with my daughter. A dance with Kiki. The way I enter her body, the way she opens to me.
Everything—everything—is lovemaking.
Everything—everything—is creation.
And all I have to do is let life enter me so deeply that I become indistinguishable from it.
To become beauty itself—not as an abstract concept, but as the living, breathing pulse that moves through all things. Through me. Through you. Through us.