Embody Real BeautySHANNON IRIS

In the last post, Beauty with a capital B, we determined that Beauty is a human need.  We need Beauty because it informs us about what makes life worth living.  In some mysterious way, Beauty is the evidence of our own personal connection to that which is life giving and life affirming.  Add that to the fact that Beauty is nebulous, spontaneous and unpredictable and we have the makings of a situation.  Critically important?  Unpredictable… Scary.

Let me try and paint a clear, concise picture of the situation.  When Beauty arises, it surprises and delights us – it puts us in touch with a feeling of exaltation – lifting our spirits in gratitude of life itself.  (This is the good news.)  Because it feels soooo pleasurable, the knee jerk reaction is to try and capture it -  BOX IT IN!  Because it might not come back – CLING TO IT!

Once we capture it, what we possess is a static replica of the once dynamic, living breathing experience of Beauty.  What has been created in the likeness of Beauty is a static Ideal of Perfection – a relic (which can still elicit feelings of exaltation in the mind and spirit).  So what do we do?  We exalt the relic.  We do this because we recognize the inherent value in beautiful things and we want to preserve them.

What happens though, when you preserve anything?  It becomes static – frozen in time.  Candied, jerked, smoked.  When beauty is captured it becomes frozen and cut off, antithetical to the very essence of Beauty. As we have determined authentic beauty is evidence of life and connection, beauty is present and fluid.  Beauty is alive.

In the act of trying to preserve that which we all instinctively recognize as inherently critical to our well-being we miss the Beauty Mark.  In our desperation we try and grab beauty and we freeze it.  We put it in a million boxes and freeze it over and over and over again creating these 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.

Snapshots of beauty abound.  Once it has been captured and marketed to us, we lose curiosity and stop being open to the experience of Real Beauty.   We forget all about the nebulous 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.   I suppose that if we surmise that we can just replicate the relic than we are safely situated in a life worth living.  Right?

Wrong.  In this quest for Beauty we are missing the mark, in fact we are aiming at the wrong target entirely.  Achieving Real Beauty becomes impossible when we are no longer open to it.