20 Jul Beautilicious
It was later in life when I realized how much beauty meant to me. In my twenties, I helped open the Saks Fifth Avenue store in San Francisco’s Union Square. The store was abuzz with celebrities and parties – glorious fun. Amidst all that hubbub, what working with fashion really gave me was a love affair with life. Later, when I worked for Hermes and saw how Bea, trained in France, could hand-sew leather purses, I was a goner. Her leather tools became an extension of her love of leather, and of beauty.
My jobs in high fashion were door-openers to a sensory-based experience of beauty that changed how I saw the world. Being surrounded by the immense creativity that these designers had to express was a catalyst for unlocking my own critical need to be self-expressed. It cultivated my shoe and clothing fetish too, for which I make no apologies. (I eagerly share stories, photos and brand knowledge.) The touch of a fabric is still a deeply sensual experience that titillates me to no end.
Embracing beauty with my eyes inserted a kinesthetic resonance that began to show itself beyond the clothing rack. To be that fully alive gave way to the wonder and treasure hunting I continue now.
Beauty’s gravitational pull is calling us all, be it in nature, a great conversation, a deep thinking speaker (like cosmologist Brian Swimme, a poetic cosmologist), a long kiss after a storm with your lover or watching the enthusiasm of sweat drip off a spin-mate as she sings aloud to Bob Marley. Your own beauty surfaces as you laugh and spit at the same time. Your beauty shows in the candor of your courage. Be a witness to your beauty (Can I get a witness?) and for goodness sake, see it in others.
Beauty makes my heart skip a beat. I can’t wait to engage with it one more time, to behold it, to find it in unexpected places and maybe, just maybe, to become it.
Beauty asks something of us: to surrender to our own malleableness. To know ourselves as evolutionary beings capable of reconfiguring ourselves as we expand and stretch. Isn’t that the coolest? Beauty is always seeking us out–hoping for adoption.
Beauty is the understudy of love. Our wise elders teach us how to absorb it. Beauty will find you; once found, it pours itself into you, making you a succulent bucket of gooey love.
And you know goo, it gets on everything.
Brown sugar love,
Melanie
p.s. Don’t google for images of beauty. It’s incredibly disappointing.
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