Adamstanley

Someone asked me once, why I only painted trees. Even though I’ve  thought about it a lot it since that night, I don’t really know. It must be their simplicty, and the humble way they go on every year, losing and gaining, barren and skeletal in winter, and with every spring their leaves sway in the wind like dainty girls dancing in green dresses. But in the end, they remain  just as proud and austere as they were those first few winters. I hope they bury me under a tree, so I can come back as a leaf. And when I die a second time, just before the end, I will be the brightest and most beautiful I have ever been, just as all of us should be, softly falling away with a dignity and grace, duteously leaving room for next years leaves. And the next, and the next…

                                                       ~~adam stanley

It’s 3 am, the darkest point between the elusive light of the morning after, and the pitch-black shadows of the night before. This is one of those places where, if you have ever lost a part of yourself, you would most likely find it, at least pieces of it, and it’s better to have piece of something, in the end, like a ruin, or the rubble of a building after it’s been bombed—even a piece of the bomb itself—-just something solid you can hold in your hand; a keepsake to carry with you through the rest of your life like a bullet lodged in the flesh. 

                                                               ~~adam stanley

Regardless of how many nights you have lived through, when morning comes, the sunrise is always a surprise; a miracle even. Each time, the sun’s spectacular light is like something you have never seen before, flooding the room like falling angels, as if its existence is an impossibility, an unreal and unproven theory that is fantastic and unbelievable until you see it and feel it. So at night, until it comes back, the light is just another lie, a myth that has been disproved, night after night, by the terrible reality of the dark.

                                      ~~adam stanley