Free People: See Beauty Where Others Do Not

The summer before I got pregnant with Harlow, I developed a voracious appetite for reading.  In three months, I had devoured eight books, including gems like The Help and The Secret Life of Bees.  There are two things I remember most clearly from what I read:

(1) The chocolate pie encounter with Miss Hilly in The Help (gah, that's a good scene).

and

(2) A description of a skunk's odor fromThe Lovely Bones.

For those of you unfamiliar with the latter story, it follows the Salmon girl ("Salmon like the fish; first name Susie"), as her spirit roams the heavens and the earth after she's been raped and murdered by Mr. Harvey, an older man who lived on the route to her school.

Susie enjoys this smell most of us find horrifyingly putrid.  In fact, she loves it so much, it's the aromatic backdrop for her version of heaven.  Alice Sebold writes as Susie, "The air in my heaven often smelled like skunk--just a hint of it...It was the animal's fear and power mixed together to form a pungent, lingering musk" (p. 15). 

It was the first time I'd ever heard beauty applied to a bad smell.  And all these years later, when a skunk's stench of attempted survival permeates the air of our winding country backroads, I think of Susie Salmon.  I consider the fear, I consider the power.  I search for the beauty.

It still stinks, but it's somehow more palatable.

Anything can be ugly from the right angle.

Winter in its nakedness.  Dimples of weight that can only be found and never lost.  Words slung in fear or hatred.

The unfree have but one lens with which to view beauty--it's either suited to the symmetry of their hopes and expectations, or it's a blundering, blubbering, ugly, obliterated pile of scraps.  They lack the perspectives that give us life's odd and striking beauties.  They don't understand it, and so to them, it can't be good.

When your heart becomes unfettered--untortured by the illusion of what should be and clasping endlessly to an unshaped lump that can be molded with care--the possibilities become limitless.

Freedom takes the scarcity of January and reforms it into the appreciation of June.

It turns a puddle into a splash pad.

It takes fat and saggy skin and stretch marks and refreshes them into challenges and goals--or even into battle scars from a life lived distantly from the sidelines.

Freedom finds beauty even in the hurling ugliness of an enemy--by seeing a charge to be an ambassador for goodness and not succumbing to the pansied doormat of victimhood.

Freedom gives new mothers the chance to find beauty in elongated, bruised, and squashed faces.

It morphs the sting of a horrible diagnosis into the joy of formerly insignificant things.

It takes splinters and thorns and nails and the agonizing cry of death and blows it as a triumphant victory cry for those of us who'd otherwise have no hope.

The lens of the unfree is picky.  The lens of the free swoops and sifts and narrows until it finds an opportunity,

a reminder,

a challenge,

an anything 

so as to be intentionally and perpetuallysurrounded by light.

Anything can be beautiful if you look at it from the right angle.  Even a stinky skunk.

You need only the freedom to see it.