Pretty Is But Doesn’t Do

Beauty signifies something more than a high degree of prettiness because ‘pretty’ and ‘beautiful’ can differ by category. We say “beauty is only skin-deep” but ‘beautiful’ can also describe character, what a person does and why. On the other hand ‘pretty’ can only be skin deep.

There’s nothing new here; the ancient Greeks thought phenotype and virtue were correlative (and that’s just one place to start). And/But in the eye of the beholder we maintain our postmodern pluralistic relativity. Your pretty/beautiful is valid but may not be my pretty/beautiful. We judge character and attractiveness differently according to our individual peculiar standards and we get them just as confused as love and lust.

Even so: embedded underneath the details of our glossy, high-res, gendered, digital standards of ideal faces and bodies – I think we really believe “beauty is as beauty does.” 

He Loves Her

He loves her, not (for her) novelty

or how exotic her soul

but for (her) light unshuttered and

unshattered, not (like his) piecemeal peace,

but for cosmic mystery –whole,

as (all) shadows seek the sacred.

~~~
Prompt taken from a line of Hopkins while thinking of my wife.

The Painted Cloud

I’ve seen blue skies. Lots of them. This was just another blue sky. And the grey cloud, there were lots of clouds in this sky and I’ve seen lots of those too. Save the very top of this cloud was impossible pink. Someone had painted it. Way up there, someone had painted a cloud.

It wasn’t like some circus rainbow vapor trail that airplanes do. No human hand could have done it, not with all the airplanes, rockets, and science in the world. The pink was impossible –painted with light like some gift from beyond the worldly realm.

Or like a harbinger. If it wasn’t painted by a human hand perhaps it was Death's harbinger. I was only walking down the street, but unlikely things happen. A car once jumped the curb and only missed me by two inches before disappearing back into nowhere. My death could’ve happened like that. Still could.

But staring at the sun, living every day as if it’s your last, never consulting maps or making plans? That’s bound get you lost in the middle of a dark forest halfway through your journey. On the other hand, even with the best laid schemes we still go awry, mistakes get made, and hit-and-runs don't always kill. If you’re not in the middle of a forest now, at any moment you could suddenly find yourself there.

Journeys need a little light for life’s inevitable losses just not so much we suffer light blindness and end up lost anyway. So maybe that’s why the occasional painted cloud: a small amount of reflected light, map direction up, just every once in a while.

Yes, just another impossible light, just another exceptional journey.