When people talk about where they findbeauty and what is beautiful to them, they reveal whom they love and how theylove, and what they love to do.
Listening as people recollect and offertheir own beauty stories, I am in awe of the ways that beauty moves in ourlives. Everyone who has a family, or loves an animal or a place or a piece ofmusic, has a beauty story to tell. A man reflects on the challenge of keepingEros alive in a long marriage, a woman speaks of what it was like to grow upwith a mother who was a model, another comments on learning how to appreciateher own beauty when compared to a classically gorgeous sister.
As we speak about our personal relationshipto beauty and what is beautiful to us, we reveal our longings to be seen, ourneed for acceptance, the powerful influence of mothers and fathers,grandparents, older siblings, first loves and favorite cousins, our keenability to remember what embarrassed, confused, and delighted us, our yearningsto stand out and to fit in, our desire to be loved. In our own stories we markthe distinction between looking beautiful and feeling beautiful -- the part ofus trapped by our culture and the part of us that knows our own value.
A nurse declares that her beauty secret isthat the husband who adores her is nearsighted, so when she is close enough forhim to see her, is seeing her with the eyes of love. A newspaper storydescribes how a young interracial blind couple got together when she becameattracted to voice, reminding us that prejudice is born in dismissing peoplebecause look different, because we see them as exotic and frightening.
"Love is blind," we say, butperhaps it is more accurate to say love sees with different eyes. Love seesbeyond the surface. Love opens the door for beauty. When we see with the eye,we develop the ability to refine, to judge, to discriminate. When we see withthe heart, we expand the view of what it is to be human, see the common dream,see the wisdom of friends and neighbours, and see there is no separationbetween that which is most beautiful and the everyday world. The eye of theheart sees with a wholeness that allows imperfections and idiosyncrasies tocoexist with beauty. The eye of the heart knows surface and depth are notopposites. Beauty is a process, a revelation, not a finished state.
Beauty reveals itself over time inrelationship. The people I love are beautiful to me. I'm not sure if my eyesare blinded by love or it is love that lets me see their beauty. Knowing themover time, my appreciation of who they are and how they appear increases. Theirbeauty comes from their liveliness and authentic sweetness, their intention tolive lives that make some sense (and some nonsense), the spirited coherence ofbeing who they are.
A teacher recalls sitting in on anotherteacher's class and thinking, "Isn't it strange how ordinary looking, howrather plain these kids are? My students are beautiful." She sees herstudents as gorgeous because she knows them well. "When you sit with themor work with them and see them every day and know their moods, they become moreamazing, not less so,"' she says. "And then, I realized that the kidsin the other classroom look beautiful to their teacher, too."
When a beautician notes, "All myclients are beautiful," I hear how her awareness of and attention tobeauty brings it out in others.
When we are most alive, we are beautiful.When we are in love, we are reminded that we are beautiful. And sometimes whenwe know we are beautiful, we find ourselves in love. "In love"usually means the romantic sense of being with one other person who in thatmoment we feel reflects us perfectly. In love, living in the field of love.Sometimes I have felt like I was in love, even when there was no one I was inlove with. I couldn't talk about my lover's hands or eyes or voice. I couldn'tfocus all this love on one other, and it was both confusing and revealing torealize how much we become places for each other to rest in. Alone and "inlove" it is easy to feel like you're making it up. Our songs and movieshave told us such great sentimental stories about being "in love," weforget that being in love can be a state of truth as well as an illusion.
Long-time friends witnessing a friend"falling in love" often caution the infatuated person that being inlove is a dizzy, temporary state. I think of this territory not just as adelicious romantic dance, but as a field to which we can travel from manyplaces. There is a way in which being in love with anything -- a person, a place,a project -- is crossing a border into a country where the ego does not rule,being in a state where essence is honoured. We are both inside and outside oureveryday selves. It is always interesting to observe what happens when wereturn to the land of ordinary life. Can we live with more generosity andtrust?
I never want to underestimate the capacitythat being "in love" has to change our seeing, expand our vision, andremind us of both human beauty and human frailty. The search for the beloved isfull of paradoxes. We want to be who we are when we are our best self, andsometimes because we have met that self when we are in love, we believe thatself only exists in the presence of the other. So we hold on to the other andlose ourselves, forget that love is partly of this world and partly of someother place.
An old beau spoke of the danger of tryingto make our lovers be God, insisting that we each need our own relationship tothe Source. It sounded logical, but I rebelled at his analysis. In this world,one of the ways we glimpse God is when we are in love. Not that the beloved isGod, but that God is the Beloved, a tradition as old as the Song of Songs andthe ecstatic poems of wandering Indian mystics, the Sufis. One of the mostbeautiful and accessible ways to address God is as Love.
The Greeks gave us an image of Eros, theunpredictable archer before whom even the Gods trembled. Hindus tell theirstories of the Gopi maidens seeking Krishna, the bewitchingly beautiful,blue-skinned god; Krishna with his soft glowing eyes, perfumed hair, Krishnadrawing women to him, touching each in forgotten registers of being.
What is done with love is done in beauty tocelebrate the God that loves. More and more I believe the messengers of love,the envoys and the couriers of beauty are everywhere. And I wonder howsomething so clear can also be mysterious. The Indian poet Ghalib writes,"This earth, burnished by hearing the Name, is so certain of Love that thesky bends unceasingly down, to greet its own light."
Acknowledgement: Sheknows.com
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