How Dare You Talk About Beauty . . .
... at a time like this!
Dear Friends,
From time to time my mom tells me that pointing people toward Beauty is all well and good for those of us who can afford it, but it’s not for everyone.
“Oh come on, don’t be ridiculous,” my mom huffed when I visited her in Scottsdale recently. “You can’t expect the poor bastards living in the ghettos without a pot to piss in to care about Beauty.” My mom is Australian; doesn’t mince words. She grew up in Sydney without a pot to piss in, with a loving, Gallipoli veteran father, stepmothers, and an older brother who told her if she rubbed thistle on her freckles they’d disappear (she tried; didn’t work).
My mom is also what I would call a devoted Beauty Hunter. It’s so woven into the fabric of her being, that she might not see it. I didn’t grow up going to church. Instead, our little family of four would jump into our Fiat and zoom to the neighborhood park to stand in just the right spot to worship the sun drop behind the Olympic Mountain range. My brother and I wriggled impatiently as the sky grew dusky and the horizon smoldered, and my mom cried out: “Have you ever seen anything so bloody beautiful in all your life?”
“Have you ever seen anything so bloody beautiful in all your life?”
This line was a leitmotif of my mom’s parenting and my system downloaded it like a computer program. I became the person who, while running with friends, stopped conversations to point out a surprising splash of blooms or a particularly fiery orange leaf on the wet path. “Look! Look! Look! Have you ever seen anything so …”
Other times, I interrupted friends on the edge of confiding something personal with, “Yes, hang on, first, you must listen to this part of the song, it’s so bloody beautiful, you will not believe it.”
How About an All-Inclusive Beauty
When the Salons for Beauty Hunters started last October, the question hung in the air: Who are we to talk about Beauty? Do we dare?
The argument that Beauty is a luxury, a nice-to-have, a distraction, or that turning toward beauty is a fair-weather sport, an experience that’s accessible only when a person feels a particular kind of way, living a particular kind of life, a few notches up the hierarchy of needs is seductive. And bullshit. We don’t need to list the painters and poets who created beautiful, life-saving art during personal or historical turmoil. The fact that so many of us take to nature, music, whatever we most love, or turn toward family, friends, even strangers feels like a vote for beauty, and life.
Imagine Beauty, also, as a space within where we feel something deep, gentle, and profound, a moment of connection, or awe; a flicker of . . . maybe joy, maybe delight, maybe calm, but it could even be a simple few seconds of OK-ness; a shiver of hope. A neutral rush of not-so-bad-ness. A reprieve from the shitiness as we stroll by a rogue peony growing next to trash cans in a back alley, or enjoy a smile thrown our way by a mischievous toddler. A flash of love. The moon, the stars, birds thrilling, a leaf dropping on your nose, wind howling, the just-right blue in the sky, a show of kindness, a joke, a hand at your back, the sun’s warmth, rain.
And I know: People endure lives that I can’t even begin to imagine and maybe if I did, I’d take back my Beauty proselytizing lickety-split. But consider this:
Despite the horror and tumult, from war, famine, violence, poverty, and the tough slog of daily life, human beings generally strive to keep themselves, their families, and each other alive at all costs. I think that’s extraordinary. Extraordinary in that it speaks to some inherent, persistent beauty, or love of life. Maybe “love” isn’t the right word, maybe it’s the perseverance of LIFE, the way life wants to continue flowing through us. Insists on it, even.
When I was 40, I became really depressed. I spent days crying in my solitary one-bedroom condo, wishing there was an exit sign I could walk through. Instead, I played the crying game while paying my bills, vacuuming the carpet, and sauteing vegetables. All the while, the witnessing presence was alive, taking notes: “Oh look at her weeping away, wanting out of here, and doing her chores, isn’t that something!” The fact that I could see this in the dark tunnel of depression was sort of beautiful, and funny. I also wrote a lot of poems.
These days, I’ve been considering beauty as an inherent part of life, even if, like my mom, many of us think of it as more of a distraction or a flame that we fan. Consider, instead, that Beauty is neutral, omniscient, persistent, unconditional and exists in all kinds of ways. That it fans us. Whether we feel it or not. John O’Donohue talked about the inner landscape of beauty, and how some people can hold a space for it, even when their surroundings are ugly and vicious.
Why would beauty, and all its definitions, be a privilege for only a certain kind of population living a certain kind of life?
Maybe my mom is right. Maybe I am fucking nuts to ask people to turn toward beauty as if it’s the meaning of life. But what have I got to lose—what has any of us got to lose? So, even if just as an experiment, let’s turn up our senses, walk through the streets more slowly, make bold eye contact, and see what the world has to offer us, how it calls to us, how we can offer ourselves to the world, in new and unusual ways.
It’s worth a try.
This summer I have two open coaching spots, for anyone who is ready to create something new, start a project, get back to writing, and wants to bring a renewed sense of freedom to the daily act of living. We’ll thread in beauty, we’ll look at what it means to create from more curiosity and play, and see where the trail takes us. More info at Everyday Creative, or email me at: Tatyana@everydaycreative.net
Gorgeous! I can see why there was a lot of beauty exclamation going on there :)