Revelation
I've been called beautiful. I've been called ugly, by others and myself.
Fat is a word commonly used, a word incorrectly used, as if the definition, as short as its length, can define everything.
Which is it?
How could anyone else know the answer to that? No one does. They have not seen me. I have yet to have seen all myself. I peel back layers of spirit only to find more left unrevealed and I am beginning to feel there is no end.
"You do not have a spirit. You are a spirit."
Beauty is discovery and no one had found me yet.
They do not know the color of my soul, nor the shape it forms around me. Perhaps we do not have a name for the shape or colors they make.
I could ask the world but their answers are sloppy; back and forth their definition goes, they stumble all over themselves with shallow words: fat, skinny, in, out.
You are just wasting away! Spoken with gleeful relish.
They don't know.
The most broken people you know will be the ones who use these words. Be prepared. Be aware.
It is simple, really. Small and big.
When did big become a bad word?
My daughter is small. My little daughter is beautiful. She likes to take the shape of elephants.
I do not need to look to know she is beautiful. I do not even need to say it. She carries her glory in her presence. I can smell it on her.
Is this beauty then? An essence, an aura, a light?
I ask God.
He answers right away:
You do not understand it. You get glimpses. Your young brain cannot fully comprehend it yet. Your mortal eyes cannot see.
I will not look with my eyes again.
These sorry, weak amenities
that work but do not see.
How often have I missed the sorrow in a friend
the deceit in my neighbor, the longing from a sister?
The brain is the one that see's things after all; the eyes are just a recorder.
The heart and the gut can tell
which pieces go together without help from the eyes.
How do the seeing get along? The blind must ask themselves.
A mountain is more than a pile of rocks.
A child is a planet.
A freckle will change you forever yet means nothing.
I do not have a spirit. I am a spirit.
I am folds and divides and hugging lines.
You can find me if you dig far enough
and rest on my cliff, where celestial birds may take an interest in you.
Where others are narrow, I am wide,
broad strokes of human lines
but I am trying to expand beyond being human.
I am trying to become a mountain.
I am going up, rising up, opening up,
blooming like snow covered mountains in spring,
hidden for months by clouds no longer.
I am going to make a home in the sky where space is not an enemy.
I will find a way to make a mountain climb.
I will find beauty at the top.
*Drawings by Henri Matisse
*Painting by Dennis Clark
* "You do not have a spirit. You are a spirit." -C.S. Lewis