Beauty Never Sleeps
by Michael Siguenza

The memories that I have of being very young come in flashes of my senses; holding my grandmother's hand as we boarded a downtown bus, the wool coat she wore with a fox fur collar. The narrow windows of the bus all steamed up as we lurched through the busy streets of downtown Seattle. I remember the smell of low tide and the squeal of seagulls wheeling above. I remember the graceful swirling motions of my three aunts practicing their Hawaiian Kahiko dances in unison on the living room floor at my grandparent's house.

All of the memories of my early childhood are sensory, and I believe that this sense of underlying beauty in the world around us is the true intention of what is meant for us. This is what sets us apart from all the other creatures on this world, not our violence and destructiveness. 

Many artists, poets, and musicians know this and are fortunate enough that this sense is never diminished with age and never leaves them. I believe that the continuation of the childhood ability to stand and stare at the sky or close our eyes and breathe in the dreamlike smell of the ocean is the state of grace that we are meant to have.

When I was very small there were so many people living in my grandparent's house that I had to sleep on the floor at the end of a hallway sometimes. That was where the little bookshelf stood holding the miraculous Enyclopedia Brittanica. While I lived there, I read the whole collection and I was transported all over the world and it fueled the thousand questions that I had for my grandmother. I remember my grandfather telling my grandmother,  "That boy is a dreamer," like that was something bad. 

I wanted to be like my grandfather, so as an adult I took up his chosen occupation and became a sailor and fisherman, sometimes a harsh and brutal occupation. But the beauty never left the world I chose to inhabit, and I saw glimpses of it every day at sea.

When we are children, before we have the burdens of the responsibilities of reality, we can look at the world around us and imagine almost anything. I can just barely remember when I was about six years old, having a toy car and playing in the dirt, building a whole world around just that one toy. Before I knew it, I was being called away to do a chore or eat a meal. Hours had gone by without me tuning back into the real world.

The real world around us requires that we tune in and work and do the tasks at hand to ensure our survival and that of our dependants, but I believe that we should remember that the dream world, the world of beauty, never sleeps and that we should tune back into it whenever we can. 

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