Beauty

 

Beauty is not glamour

John O’Donahue, On Beauty

 

There was so much beauty in the prayer circle.  More than eighty of us gathered virtually to chant, read poems, offer prayers to our yoga teacher whose husband is very ill.  As I sat heartbroken for them, I watched the sky outside my yoga room turning orange and mauve.  I wept at the preciousness of life and the incomprehensibility of death and final goodbyes.   And then the evening after, at the lake, there was so much beauty in the smooth dark water gliding over my skin like a lover’s touch.  Beneath surface, it was much colder.  Diving under I felt a tingling delight after a very hot day. 

 

We are taught by our culture, especially as women, that beauty is about how we look on the surface, about being the right shape, color, and texture. Beauty we are told is our currency for power, love, happiness, security which is why we should by this cream or that hair product. I have never felt I was a good fit for our culture’s standard of beauty. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t try over the years to attain a look that would attract the love and belonging I desired.  Now, my visibly aging body with long white hair and whispery wrinkles over the thighs and shoulder pushes me further out from that standard. But who among us is not outside that narrow band of beauty?  At any age, anyone who has been touched by illness, depression, anxiety, violence, fatness, thinness, shortness, tallness, baldness, hairiness will wonder, “Am I beautiful enough to be loved?”

 

This is a basic confusion about beauty which isn’t a look but a feeling. Real beauty doesn’t exist on the surface of things. We can look at BKS Iyengar doing an asana and find his artistry and strength beautiful.  But an experience of beauty – as oppose to a thought about it  -  will come to us only when we practice the asana.  It is in the doing, our experiences of life, where we have the chance to cultivate the feeling of beauty. I feel beautiful when I am gliding through the thick fall waters of the alpine pond, when in backbends my lungs unfold from the back of the heart to the collar ones, when I am present for a friend in despair. 

 

Beauty is the feeling of awe that comes to us when the majesty of life and our aliveness takes our breath away.