Your Beauty is Unquestionable. 

Glamour Is An Expensive Farce 

And All of Nature is Available to Prove the Goddamned Point.

Your beauty came in with you when you were still bloody and gasping your way out of the womb. So complex is your cellular design, as it was while you blinked your way from muffled water to sheer air. Understand yourself as one of myriad arrangements of atoms inherently stunning and improbable. Aliveness breathes Beautiful, grows Beautiful, fucks Beautiful and knows Beautiful as it knows itself. 

Reimagine Beauty as a moral direction. 

You have been sold a lacquered imitation sometimes called glamour, which requires striving after constantly shifting ideals. Which distracts you from presence and costs your agency. Which tells you that beauty is fleeting, and it is, but not because of advancing wrinkles, rather because all things are recycled through destruction and repurposed as ingredients in some new gathering of organic material. The iron in your blood was once part of an ancient star. And eons later may become the tissue of a deep diving fish, having traveled through fields of sod on a muddy current to the primordial sea. This is the kind of Beauty that liberates. Returns of all former illusion are accepted. No need to show a receipt.

Beauty is not just taken in through the eyes. We have a complex sensory apparatus that experiences beauty through language, touch, smell, sound, dance, nature, heart. One way to explore beauty is through language and thought. So I’m going to use words to describe myself, and I’m going to describe you.

I am passionate, and wild and strong and sometimes out of control. I am hedonistic and full of desire, and lonely and smart and scared. I have three freckles in a row on the back of my left arm and my thighs are so powerful I could run myself to safety at any time of day. My breasts have been in relationship with magnetic gravity for seventeen Earthly years since they emerged from my child chest when I was fourteen. When I am anxious and close to beginning my period, my stomach is as round and hard as a rock pulled from the New England woods. 

I am made of the same atomic structures as the stars, the oceans, the moon, and I am stunningly beautiful. You are stunningly beautiful. If you saw me the way I sometimes see myself you would fall to your knees and cry out for God like Rumi does, in ecstasy. Sometimes I see you like this. My knees are grass stained and testify to many such moments of sudden impact. 

It’s easy with a baby. Look at a baby and imagine the fresh new heart in her chest thumping blood like a bunny. See her new fingers curling like fiddleheads and remember that she is moved by electricity. Your eyes will fill with your own tiny ocean of salt water. Beauty is remembrance. 

“The senses declare an outrageous world--

Sounds and scents, ravishing colors and shapes,

Ever changing skies, iridescent reflections--
All these Beautiful surfaces

Decorating vibrant emptiness.

The God of love is courting you,

Light as a feather”

-The Radiance Sutras / Insight Verse 9 -Lorin Roche Phd

You are the result of over 350 million years of increasing complexity in the universe. You are carbon and calcium and waste and oxygen and blood and love and hunger and frenetic energy and electricity and deep rest. You are an epic poem. Your bodies are the seats of creation. You hold the potential for new life and the lineage of a galaxy in your aliveness. You live next door to me in our Milky Way neighborhood. You can borrow sugar from me anytime (except Sunday mornings. I’m really focused on the NYT Crossword then, bugger off). 

To ponder the world at the level of gravitational fields and time bending around stars is to live more fully in your neighborhood, which is the universe. Did you know that there is really no “empty” space, as understood by physics? Space and gravitational fields are synonymous, and they undulate, pulse, spin and bend, carrying matter across their vastness. Space has qualities. You inhabit this interstellar web. You fit snugly into the definition of interstellar as you are indeed “occurring or situated between stars.”

Also Time passes a little bit more quickly in the mountains than by the sea. (I know it’s a lot but how could I not tell you that?)

When we open with curiosity to the miraculous happenings all around us, we embrace a Deep Beauty, a revelatory beauty. 

There is a reason that our hearts swell when we stand in front of a waterfall, or look at a night sky, and that is because we are observing the same deep structures that we are made of. We are made of the same carbon, oxygen, salt, and light. These natural phenomena resonate in us because they are our mirrors. We are made of the same particles Big Banged into being on the eve of our Origin Story. 

The poet John O'Donohue believed that beauty is a moral value. He believed, and possibly still believes beyond the grave, that our poor urban communities have been doubly robbed by the ugliness of architecture. Grey metal is taxing on the eyes. Green space evokes compassion. That standing in a field full of fireflies is a sort of homecoming to ourselves, that beauty gathers our attention to more fully experience our aliveness.  

This is a way we can choose to see, to liberate our perspective, drink in the elixir of awe and love one another and ourselves with the reverence of understanding our place in this miracle. 

We do not just possess or receive beauty. We are not passive in relationship to beauty. We create it. In our music, our exercise, our cooking, our kindness, our stewardship of landscape, our sex, our parenting, our Junetime garden beds. 

We can perpetuate beauty myths in the way we choose to “Look at” each other rather than “seeing” one another. Is the attention in your gaze bent on comparison and contraction or mutual uplift and Deep Seeing? Remember that you are an agent in the way Beauty lives, replicates, expands, transforms and feeds you and your community. 

Take up the call to be ravished and let Beauty have its way with you. 

It has already set up shop in you. Your Beauty is unquestionable. 

Stay Encouraged,

Hilary Elizabeth Davis