Beauty

The word 'beauty' is a funny and sometimes misleading word. Sometimes, we are entrapped by it with ads on TV, billboards, sides of buses, fliers on our doors. Almost all of it has some sexual edge to it to attract us to it, get us to pick it up, and at least touch it with our eyes.

Sometimes beauty is a mountain or a climate, even a culture. As I sit and write this piece, I am on the island of St. Lucia. It sits towards the southern end of the Lesser Antilles island chain way down towards South America. It is a British Commonwealth, formerly owned by Spain, France, Britain, the Ameri-Indians, the Carib cannibal Indians (who still have relatives in the heart of the rain forest on the island) and now, for the most part, they own themselves.

This is the second time we have been deep into the Caribbean. I think the farther you are away from the U.S., the better taste you get for the life these people truly live, how they look at life, what it is that makes them go about their day-their beauty.

I think its hard to see beauty when you plan for it. I guess you have to ask 'why is that beautiful to me?' You can watch the Miss USA contest and see physical beauty although the contestants do sing and tap dance and occasionally they twirl a baton but all anyone is interested in is hoping beyond hope that she drops the baton or trips on the dance floor, kinda like NASCAR. We really don't care about that kind of beauty-its just a show.

I think beauty, true beauty, changes people when it shows itself when you least expect it-like during a funeral when the lights streak in the windows and land on the casket at just the right time, or during a storm when the power and largeness of the event is awesomely incredible, or in a poverty soaked country where the environment is striking but its people, even living in the squallier they do, somehow have the ability to put a crease in the white uniform shirts of their children in order to send them to school. I mean a crease you can cut a loaf of bread with.

I have only been among these people for a few days and only have a few days more. But there is a beauty walking here among them, a quiet, dignified beauty that I want to learn from. No matter what you ask them, tell them, talk to them about, they almost always finish the sentence with no problem. To them it is, whatever it is, not a problem.

At this resort we are staying, there was a shift change about five in the afternoon. The women were leaving. They took their purses and their bags and began the long walk up the hill to the bus stop, about a mile away. there, the buses (vans really) would pick them up and take them home, maybe about an hour away. They smiled and laughed and some did a little dance as they walked up the hill. They had good jobs, making about the national average of $350---a month.

They would do this six days a week. There is no minimum wage here, no overtime, no social security, no food stamps. If you didn't make it or grow it, you don't eat. Yet, these people, as you drive along, waive to you-

-and then they smile.

I think as I get older, I learn about stuff that has value, real value. I want to hang on to that stuff and dump the other stuff. The stuff that takes too much energy and work and try to melt things down to what really counts. I am closer to the end than to the beginning and I want to finish well, although the finish line is decades away-maybe. I don't want to finish and have some say-'who died?' Not that I need some icon or statue of my image somewhere so pigeons can crap on it.

Nope, I just want my life to count, even if it is just for one person. Here is a group of people who live on a month's salary what we can spend on a meal at home and yet they have found beauty in their lives. Their lives impact and change people who come in contact with them. I want to take what these people are showing me and bring it back and pour it on others I come in contact with. Sure, there is always a need to be able to do well in a gun fight, but those moments are rare. It is much more important to do well in every day living; to share your life and give hope among the hopeless.

These people are experts at finding beauty in life when life itself is not beautiful.

I want to be an expert too.