I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I’m so drawn to a certain kind of image. Degas dancers painted in beautiful pastel brushstrokes, in a moment in time that was not intended for the spectator eye. The worn parquet floors of Parisian apartments. The marvalous grandeur of Versailles, where nature plays a great part, winning its argument with geometry in it’s great gardens. People have a name for this now — the romantic aesthetic — and for a long time I filed it under “pretty things I like,” the same drawer where I keep peonies and teacups. But lately I’ve started to suspect it isn’t superficial at all. I think it might be a doorway. And if you’ve ever felt unexpectedly moved standing in front of a painting, or caught your breath at golden hour for no practical reason whatsoever — I think you already know what I mean.

What Is the Romantic Aesthetic, Really?

Forget the moodboards for a second. The romantic aesthetic isn’t really about a color palette — though dusty rose and gold do show up a lot. It’s about images that carry time, tell stories, and let you contemplate. Degas almost never painted the polished, performing version of a ballerina. He painted the in-between: a dancer adjusting her shoe, stretching, exhausted, half in shadow. Parisian apartments in this world have linen curtains, stacks of books that have clearly been read more than once, plaster walls with a little history showing through the paint.

Versailles is the same trick at a grander scale. Yes, there’s gold and mirror and symmetry — but the parts that actually stop people in their tracks are the quieter corners. A bench no one sits on anymore. Grandeur, and all the stories that have happened and the ones that are yet to do so.

What ties all of it together is the opposite of the frictionless, freshly-staged perfection that so much of the internet trains us to produce and consume. The romantic aesthetic has fingerprints on it.

If you want to fall down this particular rabbit hole properly, a good book of Degas’s pastels will do more for you than an afternoon of Pinterest ever could. There’s something about seeing the brushwork up close — the evidence of a hand, a decision, a smudge that was left in on purpose.

Looking Twice

Here’s the part that surprised me. The moment a piece of beauty actually catches you — really catches you, not just registers as “nice” — it interrupts something. In a world built almost entirely to be scrolled past, anything that makes you pause for even three extra seconds is doing real work.

I’ve stood in front of paintings I “should” have moved past quickly, and found I couldn’t. It’s a feeling of curiosity and awe — I just couldn’t look away yet. That little stall, that extra few seconds of looking, is contemplation in its smallest, most undramatic form. You don’t need incense or a meditation app for this. You just need something that asks you to look again, and the willingness to actually do it.

The Quiet Climb

You’ve probably seen some version of Maslow’s pyramid — the bottom layers are food, safety, the logistics of staying alive and functional. Most of our days live down there: the inbox, the laundry, the “did I lock the door” loop. But near the top of that pyramid is something Maslow called self-actualization, and beyond that, what he later described as peak experiences — moments where you’re simply, fully present, and your usual sense of “managing your life” goes quiet for a second.

Aristotle drew a ladder like this too, some 2,000 years earlier — six rungs, from the most basic thing a mind can do to the most sublime. He started at sensation: the raw, unthinking contact of your eyes on a room, your skin on the air.

I’d define meditation, for these purposes, as simply attention without an agenda. And beauty is one of the gentlest ways I know to get there by accident.

If you start noticing these moments, a small journal nearby helps. Not to analyze them — just to mark that they happened. “Saw the light do that thing again today” is a perfectly complete journal entry.

And Then — Whatever You Want to Call It

Here’s where I’ll just be honest about my own experience, without trying to convince you of anything. For me, that quiet, attention-without-an-agenda place is where I feel closest to God. And the ladder to that fine place is also usually nature scenery. If your word for it is “the universe,” or “presence,” or simply “the moment my brain finally shuts up,” I think we’re pointing at the same thing from different angles. I’d love to read your comments about what you feel.

What I find genuinely interesting is that this isn’t a new idea at all. Cathedrals were built, quite literally, to do this on purpose — the scale, the light through stained glass, the gold, all of it designed to move a person from looking to feeling small in a good way to feeling connected to something larger. Versailles borrowed a lot of that same architectural language for entirely earthly reasons, but the effect on a visitor isn’t so different. Beauty, taken seriously enough, tends to point past itself.

Living In It: The Ballerina Core Aesthetic

So — practically speaking, how do you live a little closer to this? This is where “ballerina core” comes in, and I want to talk about it honestly, because it’s a little more complicated than a Pinterest board.

On the inspiring side: ballerina core, at its best, is just the romantic aesthetic applied to your actual life. Soft knits and wrap cardigans instead of whatever’s fastest in the morning. Ballet flats. A reading lamp instead of overhead lighting. Dried flowers in a jar that used to hold something else. A corner — even just one chair by a window with good light — that exists for no productive reason at all. You don’t need a whole apartment for this. You need one corner that asks you to slow down when you walk past it.

A soft wrap cardigan or a pair of Speedcat ballet flats you actually love to wear does more for this feeling than almost anything else I own.

a corner that asks you to slow down

Now, the honest part. “Ballerina core” online can slide into something else entirely — an aesthetic performed for an audience, divorced from any actual movement, any actual ballet, any actual discipline. It can flatten a demanding art form (and the very real history of pressure around dancers’ bodies) into a soft, pastel costume. That’s worth naming plainly. Not worth spiraling about, but worth naming.

My take: keep the parts that genuinely make your daily life feel softer and more attentive. Let go of the parts that exist mainly to be photographed. The light through your window doesn’t need an audience to count.

This is, in a roundabout way, why books, movement, and nature all sit together on this blog. They’re not three separate hobbies I happen to have. They’re three different doors into the same quiet room. The one where you stop scrolling past your own life and actually look at it for a second. The romantic aesthetic isn’t the destination. It’s just a particularly beautiful set of doors.