Love and the art of storytelling (and activism?)

An aesthetic can be born from pain. An aesthetic can be born from beauty. I suppose an aesthetic can also be born from cotton candy. Or all of the above.

I often use the word aesthetic. I think about my aesthetic a lot. When I encounter a new artist, I search in their work for the language of their aesthetic as if listening to their heartbeats, and once I can feel it, I join them in conversation.

But aesthetic can be an imprecise word because it means something different to many people. Often the word aesthetic is seen as focused on determining the beauty of an object, and an aesthete is seen as someone who is removed from real life, immersed in art, perhaps even decadently so. I think our aesthetic is our lens upon the world, though. Our aesthetic holds an existential position.

Here’s how I defined it in my book The Art of Brevity.

The Greek term aisthesis means sensual perception, so an aesthetic is rooted in the feeling of experience. An aesthetic offers an entry point into our relationships with people, objects, events, environments, the past, the present, the future, and even the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. An aesthetic might seem distant from a belief system or a faith, yet an aesthetic forms the foundation for how a story or belief is expressed. An…