Embody Real BeautySHANNON IRIS

In our jubilant celebration of Beauty we try and preserve it.  What happens when you preserve anything?  It becomes static – frozen in time.  Candied, jerked, smoked.  When beauty is captured it becomes frozen and cut off – a relic.  Again, relics can be beautiful, its just that they cannot become the mark of our affections, replacing face to face encounters with Beauty.   As we have determined authentic beauty is evidence of  our connection to life, beauty is present and fluid.  Beauty is alive.

In the act of trying to preserve that which we all instinctively recognize as critical to our well-being we miss the Beauty Mark.  In our desperation attempts to grab beauty, we freeze it.  Snapshots abound.  We put Beauty in a million little boxes and freeze it over and over and over again creating static ideals of perfection. We try and replicate it and sell it in particular forms and flavors – Christie Brinkley beautiful, Kate Moss beautiful, Tyra Banks beautiful, the list goes on and on.

This is where we derail.

Once it has been captured and marketed to us, we begin the process of dumbing down.  Everybody outside of ourselves becomes the beauty expert and we lose our curiosity.   We also lose power to fill our lives with what WE love.  We lose power to fill our lives with what exalts our own minds and spirits.  We forget all about the spontaneous experience of Beauty and shoot for the sure thing – the relic.

We turn over completely our power to determine for ourselves what is beautiful and we begin to mimic the cultural standard set by the ideals of perfection.   I suppose, that if we surmise that we can mearly replicate the relic,  we are safely situated in a life worth living.  Right?

Wrong.  In that quest for Beauty we are missing the mark, in fact we are aiming at the wrong target entirely.  Remember the finger is not the moon.  The cup is not the coffee. The relics and ideals of perfection are not the authentic experience of Beauty.