We have seen over the past few weeks how beauty catches us unawares, how it is not always formulaic, but often inexplicably pleasing. The placement of a twig, the angle of a wing, the colour of a vase, the texture of fruit, there are unending variables in the science of aesthetics. The researchers tell us that the juxtaposition of red and green is particularly pleasing to the human mind, and we are coming on to look at colours as our next theme. A lot of products take advantage of such pleasure psychology, as does all the photo manipulation that goes on in advertising. But the truth is that there are very few things that we cannot, with some altering of perspective and a little metanoia, shifting of thought, find pleasing to the eye. Even the conventionally “ugly” person may have a smile that lights up the world, and just as we have to relearn our own loveliness, maybe we also need to reteach ourselves the loveliness of others.
text and photo © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt 2017 Poem below, which I absolutely love © Galway Kinnell from his website http://galwaykinnell.com/books/poetry/body-rags/poem-1/
Saint Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
