simple beauty

I think nuns are beautiful. Pious women who have grappled with their eroticism and come to understand it, made it contextually human, and came to live in penance, the austere understanding of divinity. They understand that people act out of need. And when the chaos of being frantic and desperate is done, the nuns bade us sleep. And not just nuns, but women who are in service to children, academia, whatever they give themselves to wholely, it’s on their face, the beautiful knowing and patience. Women who aid growth. Women who manage the silent aftermath

            I once knew a sistuh who I couldn’t lie to. Her eyes urged me to confide in her and mothered me toward saying truth. She was a healer. Some people are healers. They have a sense of things. And when I was stuck, ashamed or without understanding, she would touch me and create tactile community with me. Even with growing up a pastor’s kid, it was the closest thing I have ever done to true worship, other than making love or having such a sense of belonging to a woman that I felt brilliant.  

           This is to say my girl Liz is astoundingly beautiful, a lone yellow flower in a field of purple asters. She is not a nun, or anything like that. But she is clear and dedicated to something. Liz was a first grade teacher. She is like clarity in a mountain pass that comes suddenly with every sense of height and danger that makes the purpose of your journey irrelevant. Just when you swear the world has done away with beauty, and you have prepared yourself to live with your jaw tight, Liz if the rage against the pilfering of your joy. I am not sure if she knows. The best beauty is unaware and unconcerned. It is best framed by duty. You find it among the everyday chores at the stop lights, hurrying across a square of city sunlight.

           Beauty is simple, functional, and elegant. Say you travel to Monteray and pass unaware through Los Banos to find yourself driving and dreaming. A universe of incandescent sky and the rolling green hills in gentle expectation as if god was a woman who lay down to rest and pulled the earth over her hips and shoulders. A single tree that calls you to come is a single tear on the face of god, draws you toward it in solitary love. It knows what is beyond the horizon. It knows the secret and has grown to worship. Your heart begins to long for the horizon, to leave the car, the cats who are rolling with you, and go like Thoreau, the reward in the going, the transformation, the willing loss. Truly beautiful things hold loss, the whittling down to what is rich and absolute. Sometimes I am absolute as a lion. Sometimes I am chaffed down to fear and constituent to everything that seeks to destroy me. And I wear those things, sometimes.

            I am not sure how to finish this entry. Whatever I would say about Liz and real beauty would be redundant. Maybe beauty is like long division with a repeating remainder, like if you work the problem long enough you’ll find truth in the chant of numbers, that conscious place in you being honed, or the work will extend you beyond yourself towards an understanding of infinity, so far, so far that you can see John Burks Gillespie.