MANIFESTO

I believe in storytelling that does not look away.

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I believe there is more wonder in this world than we could ever possibly exhaust.

In the things we understand and the things we don’t. In animals that cross oceans and somehow find their way home. In the stories people have carried for hundreds of years. In grief. In desire. In weather. In music. In the strange rituals we create around love and death and celebration. In all the evidence that people have always been trying to make something beautiful out of the fact that we are here.

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I want to know about all of it.

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I want to know why the birds leave. What grows here and nowhere else. What people believed before us. What happened on this land. Why a certain song makes your chest hurt. Why we save things. Why we mourn them. Why we fall in love with places and animals and people knowing full well that none of them belong to us forever.

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That curiosity is at the center of everything I make.

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I am not interested in a beautiful world that has been scrubbed clean of everything difficult, strange, inconvenient, or alive.

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Give me the rain. The dirt beneath the dress. The animal that wanders somewhere it wasn't supposed to. The history that complicates the story. The flowers growing out of something that burned. The beautiful thing and the reason it matters.

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I believe beauty becomes more powerful when you understand what you are looking at.

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That luxury can be knowledge. Access. Time. Someone showing you something you never would have noticed on your own.

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It can be an extraordinary meal, or standing outside after it and learning how to find north from the stars.

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It can be silk and candlelight and champagne.

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It can also be knowing the name of the bird singing outside your window.

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I don't see a contradiction there.

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I have always loved contrast. The polished beside the wild. Sorrow beside bliss. Science beside folklore. A beautiful gown dragged through the grass. The things we can explain and the things that still feel a little like magic.

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My life has taught me not to look away from either side of it.

I know what it is to lose things. I also know what it is to remain completely enchanted by the world anyway.

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Maybe because of it.

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I still believe in scraped knees and kissing in the rain. In ridiculous amounts of flowers. In animals remembering us. In music played too loudly. In swimming after dark. In stories told around tables. In loving something enough to learn everything you can about it.

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And I believe a wedding can hold all of this.

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Not simply a beautiful room, but an entire little world built around what two people find worth loving. A chance to pay attention. To a place. To each other. To the people who got you there. To the fleeting, improbable moment when everyone you love is standing in the same place at the same time.

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That is sacred to me.

Not perfection.

Attention.

Devotion.

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I will never look back on my life and wish I was paying attention,

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I am paying attention.