David McElroy

Halloween has never been especially scary to me and horror films have held little interest. The real world has monsters far worse than whatever fiction or fantasy can imagine.

What scared you as a child? Was it the monsters under your bed? Noises in your closet? A tapping sound on your bedroom window at night when it stormed? Or maybe just the fear that someone would leave?

By our adult standards, those are (usually) childish fears which wouldn’t scare us much today. But what if your adult self could go back 20 or 30 or 40 years? What if you could go back into your own mind when you were about 12 or 15? Looking forward into the future as you now know it, what would be your biggest horror?

I’d like to suggest that the reality of our daily adult lives would be more terrifying than anything else that child self could possibly see.

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The experience of beauty can be so intense for me that it hurts my heart — but it’s a joyful hurt that is full of the pleasure of experiencing something which is completely true and real.

I first encountered this idea when I was too young to understand it. A Star Trek episode quoted a line from English poet George Herbert which asked, “Is there in truth no beauty?”

I spent a lot of time pondering that line, because it felt important in an irrational way. As I read the various English romantic poets in college, I started seeing a glimmer of understanding, but I still wasn’t there.

I read about how the Greeks equated beauty and truth. I read the English poet John Keats’ line, “Beauty is truth and truth is beauty.”

And then when I experienced a deeper form of mature love, it all suddenly made sense. I still couldn’t explain the reasoning, but I could suddenly feel it. When I experience transcendent beauty — of the kind I experienced when I photographed this sunset Monday night — I experience something about truth.

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You want success, wealth and acclaim. I want freedom, acceptance and self-expression. Everybody’s list might sound a little different. But what if we’re all really looking for unconditional love — and we’re all pursuing it in the ways we were programmed to believe would get it?

Our fantasy idea of home is the thing we’re all looking for, because that is where we’ll be loved unconditionally. It’s where people will understand us and accept us. It’s the place where we will be able to open up to others — and experience something like a mirror of our own soul.

We’re looking for a partner who accepts and mirrors us — our thoughts, our values, our hopes, our dreams.

We’re looking for people who somehow feel like home — who feel familiar and who give us a sense of belonging.

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