Moonlight

Detail from Vilhelm Hammershøi's Moonlight, Strandgade 30 (1900)1But enough about robots and dying governments. Time to stop talking about the thing and start doing the thing. Like increasing my capacity for beauty and wonder, which can be a challenging muscle to exercise when the world feels like it’s sliding into a sinister dimension.Ever since I’ve known C, she’s kept a grid of aspirational images taped to the wall to guide whatever she’s working on at the moment. Dozens of photographs, postcards, and clippings from magazines orbit her head. A mood board? I asked once. "No," she said. "An inspiration station." This phrase sticks with me because it sounds wonderfully ritualistic, like the stations of the cross.Of course, I had to overengineer this idea and invest in fifty picture frames, first all black, then all white because I wanted to achieve a Platonic grid. Nail holes riddled my wall because I couldn't get the measurements right, so I tried some serendipity and wabi-sabi, but…