Originally posted April 4, 2008. Thought I'd haul it up here again and update it a bit to remind me.
Every person has beauty and value. Some have other unsavory aspects which obscure the beauty and value, but it's there.
Some of us are eccentric, obviously old, ridiculously odd, too fat, too thin or perhaps misshapen or unpleasant or unreliable. Some folks, though beautiful, are misshapen in ways more difficult to see - disfigurement by the constant prejudgement of others, where every word was twisted, shaded, weighted and measured against some mythical standard of perfection. Or by constant criticism during childhood where every flaw was carved up like a roast repeatedly. Or by constant underserved praise and by life passages bought and paid for by blood money rather than earned. This unhappy learning is latter replayed on others.
Sometimes people find it really difficult to get past it all. Some are like moths that have emerged from the cocoon in a jar that was too small. (See my pencil drawing above) Their wings unfolded only midway and are forever bent. Yet even in this there can be value.
Like many other resources, the past can be transformed. Rather than repeat it, and live it out again and again, rather than turn the bitter criticism or the too clever manipulation on others or measuring them against an imagined perfection, or insulting them for dramatic effect (sounds familiar in the current political scene) -- the best use of the past is to render it down into art. (Not the so called Art of the Deal, but art in the expansive sense - whether literary, musical, visual, theatrical etc.) In that way it is an offering, and something is given to world.
It doesn't even matter if the world accepts it. It is the making of it, and perhaps the offering of it, that heals in a way that golden toilet seats and hair implants never can.
- Mar Walker
