Beauty

I am a woman. What don't I know about beauty? I have breathed in its instruction since I was a little girl, twirling in my mother's favorite dancing dress, hearing, "Oh, so sweet." I have absorbed the guidelines for beauty from my culture to include painting black around my eyes, and red on my cheeks and lips, but not the reverse. My ears are full of the praises and ridicules of those who abide by our group guidelines, and the faults of the unfortunates who weren't born with some measure of beauty. As if that were possible.

Martin Luther talked about the alien dignity of people, the automatic value a person holds simply by existing. We seem to understand the intrinsic value of someone who has had a tragic accident and loses mobility. But a person with a quirky or awkward gait, we allow no mercy. Our culture sees beauty in conformity, and anything that does not conform is deformity.

What are these group guidelines to beauty? They tend to be conflicting. To be beautiful, we must disallow hair to grow where it will. However, we also need to make sure that hair will grow where it has decided it won't. A few years ago, a pierced ear disaster was when the holes enlarged. Now, we try to enlarge the holes by inserting larger and larger grommets, like the people we used to gawk at in pictures from the National Geographic. While we don't (yet) see a spatula-shaped lower lip as luscious, or a neck distended by stacked rings as elegant, great wind-whistling holes in our ears are to be desired.

To be considered attractive, we slather ourselves either with stuff to make our skin darker, or with stuff to keep us from getting darker. We cut our hair to help it grow out. For cosmetic reasons, we try to eat less than we need, while much of the world is trying to get just enough, for non-cosmetic reasons. Conflicting as our rules are, no one wins. If our group guidelines were made to define beauty, they only serve now to shame us. Shame is an ugly thing.

I have spent many years being confused by our ideas of beauty. But now that I am an aging woman, I can see where beauty rests. Those who are fully themselves, unapologetic and laughing, these are the beautiful people. The person who lives in confidence of his or her own value, alien dignity, is as lovely as the trees and the stars. The simple beauty of enthusiasm is a universal cosmetic, lighting all shades of skin and levels of income with a rightness that makes our ideas sing like a sympathetic violin.

The reason that everyone says "Aah" when the girl from Ipanema goes walking is because she is herself.

Sleep

I've been thinking about sleep, since about 2 a.m. tonight, and sometimes before that hour on other nights, and sometimes as late as 4 a.m. The thoughts are all relatively the same, and that is what I want to change.

The old thoughts run along the lines of "I should be asleep. I won't be able to function tomorrow if I don't get sleep."

Since I have been thinking this for a couple of years now, the evidence seems to be in. I am able to function without 8 uninterrupted hours of sleep. Perhaps I should define function better, but I am able to drive machinery, enter data, and converse. Maybe I get a little punchy in the conversation. I might enter some wrong numbers or information. And I did recently scare my husband when I was driving...

I would be more clear about my definition of function if I could just get some sleep!

Which is really the sum of my complaint: without good rest, I seem to travel in a fog, just on the edge of experiences without being able to touch reality. Maybe insomnia is my protective mechanism for going through life's changes?

A year ago, or was it two?, I said I was sleep-depriving myself for a vision quest. All that happened, though, was my vision got worse with fatigue.

I remember an uncle and aunt out on the farm in Nebraska talking about being up since 5 a.m. and how they would just watch tv, smoke, and wait for the dawn. I thought they were talking about farm life. Now, I think maybe they were talking about sleep patterns as we age.

Since just about everyone I know near my age is talking about not sleeping, I will conclude that this is just the way things are for this time in life. What do I want to do with that information? Complain? Chill?

One help I have found, by accident, is a remedy from the health food store called "L-Ornithine." It says nothing on the bottle about sleep aid. It does, however, help me to sleep through the night. I ran out last night.

Life is giving me the lemon of sleeplessness. I think I'll make a lemonade of catching up on my reading.

Beach

“Sh” said the water on the sand.

My frustration feeds the fishes, I tried to tell myself. Like a plant giving off oxygen as its waste product, I was hoping that my emotional sludge and needling concerns would be soul food for a sea cucumber or needle fish. Instead, all I could picture were fingers of electricity zipping out from my supercharged skin and zapping the chilly creatures in the saline water. I should see bodies floating up.

I stopped the negative visualization and tried again to focus on draining my stress, my fears, and my anger into the sandy bottom of the sea.

The horizon, the strata of vog and clouds, sundown and water’s edge, sea break and tide pool looked like a slice of grey lasagne. There was beauty in the grundginess of the scene, a tropical austerity.

For the fishes, I crumbled my sorrow and unrelenting grief. I served up all the self pity I could find, but I forgot where I tucked away much of it. I laid out more fear and let confusion flake from me into the drink.

I sigh, my shoulders relax, and some sharpness around my ideas starts to soften in the water. What if my expectations are creating this distress? My life in this moment, right now, is beautiful. Remember?

The heavy liquid of warm sea water presses in on my calves, licks behind my knees. I step out of the water back onto the sand, feeling the viscous liquid reluctantly release me. Warm breezes chill past my wet legs. The top of the sand is evening cool, but as I burrow my feet into the gritty velvet, stored heat from the day kisses my toes. Of course. I remember. I am loved! I am not thinking specifically of my beloved or pets or friends but of something that loves me, for which I have no name. I’ll call it me. Why not? Or it can be you, if you prefer. Calling it The Nameless sounds silly because, well, it is nameless.

Perhaps it was time to head home. This was the end of my work day, a transition and decompression at the beach to let the dog run. I still had things to do.

“Sh” said the water on the sand.

I wiggle my feet out from their sandy nest and wade back into the water. The dog, glad to see that I am still at it, barrels in after me. He sits down in the tide pool, his tail and body slightly rocking with each surge, and looks out on the horizon.

I let him be. He lets me be. At the beach, we be.

beliefs

Do you know what you believe?

I have spent some time trying to find what I believe to be true about various things ranging from germs to deities, from weather patterns to plastic containers. So far, I have come to one conclusion: what we choose to believe becomes true for us.

Is this too simple an approach to testing beliefs? I don't like the new age idea that we create our own reality, as I may have argued before. It's just not logical. But the idea that our beliefs shape our perception of our reality is becoming clear to me. This is both empowering and frightening to think about.

more about suffering

I read in my new O magazine about a woman who had her face taken off by a bear. Before that, her house burned down. Before that, she fell from her horse and broke her back.

She said that over time you just get existential about suffering and say, "This happened."

There is profound power in her simple two words. Not, "because I did such-and such, or because they did such-and-such, or because..." No because anything. It just happened.

I think the most difficult part about suffering at the hands of another human is that we are innately made to love. When someone hurts us, it interferes with our ability to love, and the block and frustration are worse than the insult. We want to love each other. Eventually, over time we regain our ability to love those who have hurt us, but the in-between time is very distressing. The frustration of our willingness to love is the greatest part of any insult.

Maybe there's a way to "let time take its course" faster, but I haven't found any shortcuts that work yet. Forgiveness comes naturally, in its own time.

Suffering

I've been reading books by Toni Morrison this holiday season. I guess I wasn't in the need for cheer. Her books paint a very clear picture of how people have suffered. We have hurt and maimed others, and then we each turn on "our own" and cause pain. When that is over, we turn on ourselves.

There really isn't a way to measure suffering. Bullying comes in a rainbow. My kids have suffered. My husband and I have suffered. Ours has been big enough suffering. I don't know how the slaves managed to bear up and keep on. I don't know how Ghandi's followers kept their strength. I don't know how people manage to heal from deep damage done by those who would dominate over them.

More than anything, how do we let go of the pain? It's clear that if we don't let it go, we will pass it on. I say that talking about it, writing about it, is a powerful way to let it go, let it be, but not have to relive it inside of us. In teaching us to read and write, our earliest teachers were helping us to know how to heal ourselves from the inevitable suffering.