I have a hard time defining beauty.
I just can’t quite get there.
Besides… everyone has already tried.
No description is so original as most of us wish it were, when we tuck cards in bouquets of flowers, or write vows, or make passionate declarations to someone new, or try desperately to pen a verse that lasts past a breath.
You’ll come up with decent definitions on occasion, but those notions are by their very nature transient; ideas specific to a certain space, a certain time, a certain experience.
At other times, you’ll fail miserably, and wonder why the right phrase seems so elusive when there are so many words to choose from.
The truth is that we all see beauty so differently that any attempt to find a common definition fails like a conversation at the Tower of Babel.
I was once told that all poetry was based on the effort to say what was beautiful, whether by capturing magnificence with some accuracy — as though it were something you could measure! — or trying to illustrate just the opposite, in hopes that a comparison would bring true meaning to light.
I’d say that’s far too sweeping. Some poetry is just about leaky faucets or grandmothers.
Not that there isn’t something impossibly gorgeous about a falling drop catching sunlight at the end of a polished metal fixture, or the face of an old woman, etched with lines and history.
But.
Someone else told me that if you spend your whole life trying to say what beauty is, you will be too tortured to sit back and appreciate it. All you can do is look and feel and experience and know loveliness around you, and accept that you’ll never manage to communicate how it changes you inside.
I’m not sure who has it right.
Like I said — I probably won’t ever know.
I’m certainly not eloquent enough to put it in concrete terms, nor wise enough to let it be.
All I am sure of is this:
that which catches my breath and opens my eyes
that which straightens my spine and quickens my gait
that which grows and bends and twists and encircles
that which comforts and inspires and draws me in
that which launches me into the sky like a push on a swing
that which teases and topples and twirls me about
that which whispers reassurances and tells sly jokes
that which makes me feel at home and abroad all at once
that which is solid as the earth beneath me, and as quick to change as the clouds overhead
that which I see in you, and none other in the same way
Well… that’s my beauty.
And that is good enough.