Beauty

                A model, a superstar, with thighs so perfectly chiseled, breasts push-up, lips full, and hair shimmering is not beautiful.  Life in perfect bliss, a heaven where all your wishes come true is not beautiful.  Imagine someone swimming.  Twirling and swirling in a pool, two people preforming a dance, doing circles around each other.  Imagine the perfectly enacted strut of a business man, high power, mindset, determination steadfast.  Imagine a swan gliding across a lake, beak down and body slender.  These do not show beauty.  Beauty is the actuality of swimming.  Swirl and twirl, these two bodies so elegant, still must push their way through the water.  They wave their hands and kick their legs, they sweat and they breathe hard as they bob up and down the surface.  The man walks awkwardly, stepping forward and realizing he forgot to kiss his wife, miss stepping.  A swan must survive in the wild, kill when needed, and take pain when hindered.  The swan’s heart beats, pumping blood through its body.  The swan’s lungs contract and retract, filtering oxygen from the air, rusting the swan’s body oh so slowly.  Beauty is this naturality of the universe.  Beauty is the mistake.  Birth is beautiful, pain, blood, tears, and all, birth creates a life which will spend many years being hurt, crying, and feeling lonely.  Birth creates this life which sees joy and loves and let’s live because it knows what pain is.  Beauty is this silent struggle, beauty is birds calling in a forest each surviving another day and singing all the while.  The pop songs and perfect pictures, the romance novels written so perfectly so as to make you want them, the fatty foods which we all love so much; these things show no beauty.  They are the essence of all which we consider good, all which is the light, but with none of the shadows.  Yin without yang and this is ugly, unnatural.  An apple is beautiful for it is sweet and savory while being tart and rigid.  An old guitar is beautiful for it lights into the room with glee and music while twinging and buzzing, sounds of a worn instrument.  Women are beautiful, imperfect skin, blemishes, periods, and faults of personality.  Men are beautiful no matter how strong or who calls them “a man,” despite their decaying age or their laughable youth.  Humanity is beautiful and nature is beautiful.  Spring is beautiful for flowers are born and bees buzz, yet rain each day, winds, illness, and a muck of backyards.  Winter colds, glistening snows; Fall oranges, slowly concealing of life; Summer greens, Summer hot, hot, blistering sun.  It is beauty which is the two of one.  Beauty is none of the perfections without all of the failures.  No superstar is beautiful without the years of practice and patience.  God does not need free will to justify pain.  God needs pain to justify glee.