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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
Notes on the Need
for Beauty: An Intimate Look at an
Essential Quality
by J. Ruth Gendler
Marlowe & Company -
May 2007
A
Meditation on Love
When people talk about where they find
beauty, what is beautiful to them, they
reveal whom they love and how they love,
and what they love to do.
Listening as people recollect and offer
their own beauty stories, I am in awe of
the ways that beauty moves in our lives.
Everyone who has a family, or loves an
animal or a place or a piece of music, has
a beauty story to tell. A man reflects on
the challenge of keeping Eros alive in a
long marriage, a woman speaks of what it
was like to grow up with a mother who was
a model, another comments on learning how
to appreciate her own beauty when compared
to a classically gorgeous sister.
As we speak about our personal
relationship to beauty and what is
beautiful to us, we reveal our longings to
be seen, our need for acceptance, the
powerful influence of mothers and fathers,
grandparents, older siblings, first loves
and favorite cousins, our keen ability to
remember what embarrassed, confused, and
delighted us, our yearnings to stand out
and to fit in, our desire to be loved. In
our own stories we mark the distinction
between looking beautiful and feeling
beautiful -- the part of us trapped by our
culture and the part of us that knows our
own value.
A nurse declares that her beauty secret
is that the husband who adores her is
nearsighted, so when she is close enough
for him to see her, is seeing her with the
eyes of love. A newspaper story describes
how a young interracial blind couple got
together when she became attracted to
voice, reminding us that prejudice is born
in dismissing people because look
different, because we see them as exotic
and frightening.
"Love is blind," we say, but perhaps it
is more accurate to say love sees with
different eyes. Love sees beyond the
surface. Love opens the door for beauty.
When we see with the eye, we develop the
ability to refine, to judge, to
discriminate. When we see with the heart,
we expand the view of what it is to be
human, see the common dream, see the
wisdom of friends and neighbors, see there
is no separation between that which is
most beautiful and the everyday world. The
eye of the heart sees with a wholeness
that allows imperfections and
idiosyncrasies to coexist with beauty. The
eye of the heart knows surface and depth
are not opposites. Beauty is a process, a
revelation, not a finished state.
Beauty reveals itself over time in
relationship. The people I love are
beautiful to me. I'm not sure if my eyes
are blinded by love or it is love that
lets me see their beauty. Knowing them
over time, my appreciation of who they are
and how they appear increases. Their
beauty comes from their liveliness and
authentic sweetness, their intention to
live lives that make some sense (and some
nonsense), the spirited coherence of being
who they are.
A teacher recalls sitting in on another
teacher's class and thinking, "Isn't it
strange how ordinary looking, how rather
plain these kids are? My students are
beautiful." She sees her students as
gorgeous because she knows them well.
"When you sit with them or work with them
and see them every day and know their
moods, they become more amazing, not less
so,"' she says. "And then, I realized that
the kids in the other classroom look
beautiful to their teacher, too."
When a beautician notes, "All my
clients are beautiful," I hear how her
awareness of and attention to beauty
brings it out in others.
When we are most alive, we are
beautiful. When we are in love, we are
reminded that we are beautiful. And
sometimes when we know we are beautiful,
we find ourselves in love. "In love"
usually means the romantic sense of being
with one other person who in that moment
we feel reflects us perfectly. In love,
living in the field of love. Sometimes I
have felt like I was in love, even when
there was no one I was in love with. I
couldn't talk about my lover's hands or
eyes or voice. I couldn't focus all this
love on one other, and it was both
confusing and revealing to realize how
much we become places for each other to
rest in. Alone and "in love" it is easy to
feel like you're making it up. Our songs
and movies have told us such great
sentimental stories about being "in love,"
we forget that being in love can be a
state of truth as well as an illusion.
Longtime friends witnessing a friend
"falling in love" often caution the
infatuated person that being in love is a
dizzy, temporary state. I think of this
territory not just as a delicious romantic
dance, but as a field to which we can
travel from many places. There is a way in
which being in love with anything -- a
person, a place, a project -- is crossing
a border into a country where the ego does
not rule, being in a state where essence
is honored. We are both inside and outside
our everyday selves. It is always
interesting to observe what happens when
we return to the land of ordinary life.
Can we live with more generosity and
trust?
I never want to underestimate the
capacity that being "in love" has to
change our seeing, expand our vision, and
remind us of both human beauty and human
frailty. The search for the beloved is
full of paradoxes. We want to be who we
are when we are our best self, and
sometimes because we have met that self
when we are in love, we believe that self
only exists in the presence of the other.
So we hold on to the other and lose
ourselves, forget that love is partly of
this world and partly of some other
place.
An old beau spoke of the danger of
trying to make our lovers be God,
insisting that we each need our own
relationship to the Source. It sounded
logical, but I rebelled at his analysis.
In this world, one of the ways we glimpse
God is when we are in love. Not that the
beloved is God, but that God is the
Beloved, a tradition as old as the Song of
Songs and the ecstatic poems of wandering
Indian mystics, the Sufis. One of the most
beautiful and accessible ways to address
God is as Love.
The Greeks gave us an image of Eros,
the unpredictable archer before whom even
the Gods trembled. Hindus tell their
stories of the Gopi maidens seeking
Krishna, the bewitchingly beautiful,
blue-skinned god; Krishna with his soft
glowing eyes, perfumed hair, Krishna
drawing women to him, touching each in
forgotten registers of being.
What is done with love is done in
beauty to celebrate the God that loves.
More and more I believe the messengers of
love, the envoys and the couriers of
beauty are everywhere. And I wonder how
something so clear can also be mysterious.
The Indian poet Ghalib writes, "This
earth, burnished by hearing the Name, is
so certain of Love that the sky bends
unceasingly down, to greet its own
light."
Copyright
2007 by J. Ruth Gendler. Published with
permission.
J.
Ruth Gendler is an artist, writer, and
teacher. She is the author of The Book
of Qualities and the editor of
Changing Light: The Eternal Cycle of
Night and Day. The Book of
Qualities, now in its fortieth
printing, has been adapted as a two-act
theater piece and translated into German,
Japanese, and Chinese. In addition to
personal essays and poems, Gendler writes
about the arts, education, health, and
books. Her artwork has been exhibited
nationally. Gendler has taught writing and
art in a variety of settings for twenty
years. She has been an artist in residence
with both California Poets in the Schools
and Young Audiences of the Bay Area, and
leads writing and creativity workshops.
She received her BA in English and
communications from Stanford University,
and she now resides in Berkley,
California. Her website is
www.ruthgendler.com.
Read
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