Chasing beauty

Three weeks ago, I had cosmetic surgery.  Nothing crazy, just a little work to my neck. (I’ve always been obsessed about not ending up with a “turkey neck”)

Everything went great.  Easy peasy.  Healing was going great, hardly any bruising or swelling.  Some of  my stitches were out and then in the middle of the night on Day 8 I felt a sharp pain in my left check that woke me up.   I put my hand on it and could feel the swoosh, swoosh of blood pumping into my cheek.  My face and neck swelled up like a balloon. 

Hours later I was in emergency surgery getting my face opened back up to clean out all the blood, cauterize the vein and stitched back up. 

Only this recovery was different.  Lots more pain.  Lots of swelling.  The doctor made  two house calls to check on me those first few days.  Still, a few days later I had an infection, despite antibiotics.  More antibiotics, stronger.  Every day I went to the doctor and he pressed and prodded, pushing infection out of the tissues.  Two showers with Dial soap each day.  Silver sufadine cream on the new incisions.  Lots of pain and pain medicine.  And still, the infection persisted. 

So, tomorrow I get to go back to surgery for a third time.  To clean out the infection.

I’m angry, scared, defeated.  I want to cry all the time. 

But mostly I’m angry at myself.  Angry for doing this to myself.  And in trying to extend grace to myself I’ve been thinking alot about all this. Why I did it. What it was about.

The first time I had a neck lift I remember feeling a distinct sense of the violence I had inflicted upon myself just to look better.  I told myself then I wasn’t going to do it again and yet I did.  (Never say never).  I was feeling old, and wanted to feel good about myself again.

After the infection set in, I had a couple of meditation sessions - hoping for peace, hoping for insight. What came to me was the realization that despite my promises to myself of ten years ago, what I had not done is learn to love myself.   Like really. I mean, there are a lot of things about myself I love. Even a lot of things about how I look that I love. But not my whole self. Not without reserve. Sometimes I see pictures of myself and unless they are just -so:  my hair is good, the angle is right, my makeup is good, etc., I hate what I see.  I can’t seem to learn to love it.  In one of my meditations, I had a distinct experience of loving myself, every part of myself.  The soft, flabby parts, the parts with brown spots, the saggy, baggy parts.  All of it seemed beautiful and wonderful in that moment.  But it was fleeting and the truth is I know that given a few weeks for the trauma of this face thing to wear off, I would go get lasers done on the spots on my hands.  I just would. 

Today, when I came home from my pre-op appointment, feeling like I want to cry all  morning, somehow, the beauty of my life started rushing over me. I touched the purple flowers on the vitex tree as I passed it.  My cactus are blooming.  My lantana are blooming.   Everything is green and lush and beautiful.  I thought about my life and just how breathtakingly beautiful it has been.  Even the parts you might say were ugly.  Even my first marriage which I’ve always said was my greatest regret.  But if you think about it, I got to marry and have children with a great love of my life.  I got to experience one of those relationships that is filled with SO much pain and so much ecstasy too.  Not many people get that.  I thought about my marriage now and how it is the most tender, beautiful thing I could ever imagine.  It brings me to tears.  I’ve gotten the gift of being with a man who loves me in a way I honestly didn’t know existed and still to this day find hard to take in.  A relationship that has changed my life and the lives of my children in ways I know and probably to depths I have no idea .  I have three utterly beautiful children.  Not just utterly beautiful physically (which they are), but utterly beautiful souls.  They all have such depth, such intelligence, such light in them and also such rich and honest darkness. I have two amazing - and also beautiful stepchildren - who are intelligent and thoughtful people with whom I’ve become friends and who I love and respect. I have just the best friends who love me and whose friendships have been seriously life giving. I have three siblings who love me and would do anything for me. I’ve just had the absolute cutest grandson ever.  He and I have our secret. We know how hilarious the whole thing is – this life.  We smile and laugh at it together.  One night, we swam through twinkling lights and dark blue water together.  We know what we know about how beautiful swimming through life is.  The twinkling lights of it and the dark, deep waters of it.  And I’m about to have a granddaughter

My house is beautiful, the trees around it are beautiful. I’ve loved and been loved by four beautiful dogs and now two beautiful cats. 

 My life is so excruciatingly beautiful. I sometimes wonder how it’s possible.

I got to thinking about how beautiful this world is. Beautiful in a way that can hardly be expressed. All of life is a yearning for beauty. The seeds in the ground, the buds on the trees, the bees gathering pollen. The sex that everything and everyone is having and the incredible beautiful creatures it creates.

Even the hours we spend earning money, so we can buy beautiful things.  The effort we spend trying to be beautiful, stay beautiful.  Sometimes painful effort.

As I get older, sometimes I look at young people and just think about how beautiful they are and they don’t even know it.  Their smooth skin, their thick hair, their white teeth, their firm bodies.  So beautiful it makes you want to cry. 

The sunsets, the mountains, the milky way, the butterflies, the bees, the flowers.  So beautiful it makes you want to cry.

When I was on my psychedelic journey this spring, all I could think was how beautiful the entire journey was.  What I saw ,what I felt, the tears I cried, the grief I felt, the death.  

But it seems I missed it.  Or I would have been able to see how beautiful I am.  The wrinkles, the sags, the brown spots.  All of it.  

So I enacted violence upon my face to make it more beautiful.   

Is that what we do to try to create beauty?  Is that where violence comes from?  We want a beautiful world, an idealistic world that fits our idea of beauty – our IDEOLOGY of beauty .  And we cut and tear at it and at ourselves, and at one another in violence to try to get at it.  Often though, instead of creating beauty, we create scars and wounds and infection instead.   Because we can’t see the difference between beauty and an ideology that seems beautiful. We can’t take in that beauty must also include ugliness. There can’t be one without the other.

I wonder if the very creation of the beauty of the world somehow wrapped up in violence?  Is that why we have the metaphor of Christ slain from the creation of the world?  Before the creation of beauty it was just unified -- formlessness and void.  Peaceful perhaps, but no beauty.   And God had to enact violence upon gods-self to create a space for something other than gods self.  Kenosis.  The death of god, the emptying, the nullifying, the cutting open and rending apart, the opening.   Absolute “beauty” - ideological perfection making space for something else so that actual beauty can exist. Slain from the foundation of the world.