Beauty

 

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
― Confucius

 

Today on my FB feed I saw something that troubled me a bit. A friend reposted a picture of a girl with Down Syndrome that her brother had posted. The brother was upset that the girl did not consider herself beautiful and he wanted to convince her she was. The friend (well acquaintance, you know how these FaceBook things go) demanded to know why people think its ok to lie to others and that the girl knew the truth so why should he let her think otherwise. This struck me as wrong on so many levels. Yes, the fact that aesthetics is subjective is a cliché at best yet even without that being a consideration it occurred to me what a narrow definition of beauty my acquaintance had. I believe that any combination of features can produce beauty. It may be a smile or a moment of strength through adversity that shines in the eye or even sorrow. The prettiest person can give ‘ugly’ looks.
Even beyond people you can find beauty anywhere. A raging fire or gunshots in the night can appear beautiful. A deadly micro-organism seen through a microscope may as well. I don’t know but if its between looking for the beauty in something or seeing a marred surface, I know what I would choose every time.
Blessings, G

 

Click on images to see full-sized:

 

LeapingLeaping by G A Rosenberg

 

ObservantObservant by G A Rosenberg

0 thoughts on “Beauty”

  1. Here Frank Sinatra addresses the topic of loving someone who others see as less than “perfect”:

    A few years ago I published a poem questioning the behaviour of looking for identity in the “wrong places”, i.e. outside of oneself:

    IDENTITY.

    Don’t be afraid …
    and don’t be a bioche,
    or a jackass of all trades.
    Can’t you see that I don’t really
    want to have sex with you …?
    I want to be loved, and looked up to;
    and I sometimes want to be you.
    Am I searching for identity in
    all the “wrong places”? Perhaps,
    but the part I dislike the most is that
    I will do almost anything to get it.
    Identity.

    (Adam Donaldson Powell, from “Gaytude”, 2009)

    1. Fantastic…
      Funny thing, identity resembles one of those things searched for by Dorothy and the crew in Oz. Something that when uncovered, you find that you had all the time

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