Looking Clearly at Beauty
Our scars help write our story. They also point to our inherent beauty.
Scars come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The ones that often come to mind are the ones on my body. Many of these are testimony to a life well-lived. They give voice to childhood moments of innocence.
My knobby knees tell the tale of climbing a tree and jumping off the highest branch into a pile of leaves because I was convinced they would break my fall. Then there’s the thin line at the corner of my lip reminding me of the day I was a 10-year-old Wonder Woman saving my little brother from a bully.
Of course, there are other kinds of scars. Scars left by a life of addiction and from unwelcome visitors, as well as emotional and spiritual scars. These scars are the voices of others telling me I am less than my own magnificence and that I am anything but beauty incarnate. Instead, these scars become a yoke of shame.
Letting Our Scars Design Us
We all have different types of scars. Each recites a page or chapter of our story, and our stories matter. Whether we realize it or not, underneath it all, our narrative points to the beauty that is inherent in all life.
However, I think we get confused about beauty. Too often the word beauty is used to designate value for outer appearances; it’s a human judgment. As a result, I’ve grown up a little confused about beauty and how it applies to me.
We tend to see beauty arising as symmetry, harmony, balance, or proportion. As a result, I have often asked while looking in a mirror, “What am I seeing that is not in harmony, asymmetrical, out of balance, or not beautiful?”
I have learned that any answer to this question is pointing me to an unlived and unloved piece of myself waiting to be cared for, to be brought into the balance of my own wholeness. There is no piece of me that can be left out of the “beauty” equation.
Seeing with “Eye” Versus “I”
If I look closely at a tree, my “eyes” see dead twigs, broken leaves, and knotty bark, just like the scars on my body.
What “I” see is the tree standing tall in all its glory and splendor as I bear witness to the perfect rhythm of imperfect beauty.
We’re all familiar with the phrase “beauty is in the eye of beholder,” so am I looking with my “eye” or with my “I”?
When I look with my “I,” beauty is everything, it is all. It’s not what I see with the judgments of my eyes or what you say is beautiful; it’s about remembering there exists that untouched place of grace, the heart of wholeness in all life.
It is this exquisite innocence that saves us, unites us, heals us, empowers us, nourishes us, and makes us beautiful.
The tree would not be the tree without all its elements. The universe knows nothing else than how to make beauty, and my work is to remember I am a part of that universe. My story in all its glory and all its depravity is a seedling of the great universal story.
The Tao invites us to slow down, watch the water that has been stirred by storms, and wait for the mud to settle so that what is mine to fully see—whether it is the tale of the knotty bark that has grown for centuries on this tree or the story of my scars—can become clear and rise to the surface. Beauty asks me to be with my story, attend to it until I can be touched by it and see with my “I.”
I allow my story to shape me into a beautiful instrument with strings that can be plucked by the winds of my experience, and then played by my calloused hands, creating a symphony by what I say and what I do in the story yet to be written.
It is a story of adding to the beauty of the universe, the beauty known only as me.
“Rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in God’s sight.”—1 Peter 3:4