Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Your Heart Knows What is Beautiful


As I gaze at my beautiful 13 year old daughter Sofie, her skin is smooth, her eyes are so bright and hair so shiny. I reflect on my own journey of aging and ponder the concept of beauty. Beauty is such a personal matter of opinion. In different parts of the world, there are such contrasts of what beauty should look like. In Africa, women wear long metal plates that basically stretch and elongate their necks so they have a giraffe like features. In Maurita, they find larger women ideal and no self respecting Mauritian man would marry any woman that was skinny in comparison with our North American ideal where you can never be too thin or rich. In Asian culture, flawless, pale white skin is the ideal. In Brazil, it's the ever longing search for a perfect nose, plastic surgery is rampant everywhere in South America, especially Brazil. Women as young as 16 are getting plastic surgery procedures.

In fact in most of these cities, they start the "ideal" of beauty at a very young age, sometimes as early as 5 or 6 years old. These beauty ideals are forced upon their daughters, so that they will have the most opportunity as they get older to be beautiful and be attractive to men and possibly marry. It's what was done to them and what will continue to happen to their granddaughter and so on and so on. Don't get me wrong, I am not blaming the mothers, its what they know and they are trying to give their daughters the best chance they can, really no different than what I am doing as a mother. Especially in some countries where marrying a man is really your only survival mechanism.

I personally think knowledge is beautiful and what I understand from my own journey is that beauty is not just from the eye of the beholder but what we are taught, told and what we pass on to our daughters, and others we come in contact with. I'd like to set an intention for all of us, to start telling ourselves and others what we feel is beautiful. I won't even begin to tell you what or how that should feel like, that is completely up to you. Make up your own ideals of beauty. Instead of looking with your eyes and accepting what is told to us to be beautiful by the media or by society. Feel what is beautiful, feel it deep within your heart, I think if we all start feeling beauty instead of trying to create it, we will all be in a much better place in the future.