Beauty
It's the movie in my mind—
Oprah flashing her brilliant smile and cooing, "You can look like me when you're in your fifties too!" and then announcing some other bit of wisdom from her sizeable tome in her best, down-home, I'm-no-different-than-the-rest-of-ya'll voice. "Own the Number, Girlfriend," she drawls. That is, the one on the scale—when, damn, she's a woman who has a whole team of fitness trainers, her own private chef, a driver, a bevy of assistants, an army of housecleaners, and who knows what all else. I hate her sometimes. I briefly consider killing my TV.
The rail-thin models in Vogue magazine posed as artfully as mannequins. The photo frames click by in a flurry. Are they alive? Or are they dead? I wonder while gaping at their skeletal limbs and hollow chests.
The stories about the dangerously thin starlets that I feel strangely compelled to read in the Hollywood gossip mags while I wait in the grocery store line, secretly gloating about the fact that I guess they really aren't so perfect after all. Tee-hee-hee. Or those candid photos that show Keira Knightley's cellulite-riddled behind. I vow to never look at a beauty magazine again.
Stop!
This is an old story. At least a couple of generations' worth. For me, personally, nearly 30 years ...
Why am I beating myself up for this extra 15-20 pounds? (I'm pinching the extra inch-plus around my middle.) After all, I'm not obese. I'm reasonably healthy. I'm fairly active, and upping the activity level will help me shed some of the ... er ... "extra". I can do a lot of things that a lot of women my age or younger can't. (Or just simply don't have an interest in doing, which is totally cool.)
After battling an eating disorder since I discovered the dangerously intoxicating power of "thin" at age 16 and then wrangling with it all through my college years and into my late twenties, I've finally realized that it doesn't matter how much I weigh or what the scale says. I will never like what I see in the mirror. I will never be good enough.
And for whom, I wonder?
And here's what's funny and wonderful and sad at the same time. My husband thinks I'm a real beauty. That's what the darling man calls me sometimes, simply—Beauty.
Though I rarely believe it. Silly woman that I can be.
It's the movie in my mind—
I'm standing in the pasture in my coveralls and barn boots. My eyes are closed, and Toby, my percheron horse, is looming behind me.
The wide, silent screen behind my eyes is embued with hues of burnt umbre, the blood red of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The big equine nudges me with his nose, but I stay where I am, basking in the warmth of the sun on my face and all over my body as it sinks lower into the horizon, and I descend with it. My nostrils are quivering at the scent of piñon until it fills me up and I am no longer flesh and blood and bone.
I wade into the bold, underground river that runs beneath and through everything, where I am dashed against rocks and stones into something other. Spirit? I don't know. I'm not going to get all metaphysical on you here. Call it him, her, it, whatever you will. The great, ineffable, unknowable one sets me free. I am no longer separate and alone inside this skin. And when I draw the curtains of my own private theater open wide, I am surprised beyond words to see a blue sky framing a gold hawk who pitches and dives above me and Toby. Really.
I am not a flat image on a glossy page or so many pixels on a television screen. I am a mother, sister, daughter, wife, lover, friend. I am a horsewoman. I give Toby's neck a good scratch. The black horse noodges me back. Someone who speaks the language of impending rain, thunder, waving grass, grain, wind, snow, lightning bolts, and that bend around the mountain path. The syntax of here and now.
I am a beauty.
We all are.
UPDATE: Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. Check out Dove's short film Evolution.
Speaking of getting active... Equestrian vaulting practice is starting soon!
