(An essay I wrote for my Mother during her battle with breast cancer)

The beauty without is only from the beauty within. Beauty parlors use beauty
products. Women everywhere, at the rise of dusk, voice their concern for their ancillary
sleep to boost their beauty. These ideas lead people to believe that beauty is externalwhich is to say anything on the anterior of the eye. It leads people to believe that beauty
is in the strands and tufts of hair, in the freshly scraped,, lacquered,, and sized cuticles,
in the carefully traced hollows around the eyes, and in the pushed and pursed tracings
inside the vermillion border.
Beauty is only present with perception. Without the internal you could not
appreciate any perceived beauty from the external. Beauty is used to describe physical
qualities as well as psychical. When we try to define the word beauty, we unconsciously
apply the bias of our preponderant sense- vision. Visual beauty is a loop, beginning on
the inside and finishing on the inside, only meeting the external through the eyes and
never completely. Imagine you were blind. Imagine that you have never visually
experienced anything in the world. Think about yourself. Can you think of yourself as
visually beautiful? If you could not experience your physical body visually, you would
have to rely on others perceptions and judgements of visual beauty to inform you about
visual beauty. Even with vision we still rely on others perceptions and judgements of
beauty, but that does not mean we cannot ply our other methods of perception to
experience it. If you have never visually experienced your outside body, would you still
know that it was you? Would visual beauty be of importance without the use of sight?
You are not defined wholly by your external body.
Think about breathing. Fill your lungs deliberately and hold the breath in pause.
Think about how many breaths your body has directed without you being aware of it.
Think of how many lubricating blinks your eyes have swiped without you guiding them
open and closed. Think of the distance that your feet have carried your body without
you driving the conscious cadence of left, right, left. Think about how your body seems
to function independently of your thought. You are not your body. Just like a driver is not
a car. A driver is in the car. And a good driver makes the car an extension of his body,

but is still able to unbuckle and exit. A good self makes a body an extension of its mind.
You are not merely your external body.
If beauty began on the outside we wouldnt begin in our mothers womb. Babies
are cute because of their size and proportions, but babies are beautiful because of what
they are, a continuance of a story. As we grow older and further removed from the
beginning of our story, we trade our infantile perceptions of the world by dividing and
segregating the world with language. By doing this we lose our ability to be of the whole.
When the whole is fractured by words, it ceases to be unified. However, we never lose
our innocent perceptions. They become trapped and left untouched except for rare
occasions of decoration or distraction. Although our innocence never leaves us, we
never believe in it the same way after we learn to distinguish ourselves from the rest of
the world.
We often try to decorate our body with paints and ornaments, but that never
changes the inside you. We are not walls or canvasses that change with color and
shape. We are thoughts and feelings that are realized through the communication of all
our senses. Person in Latin literally means to sound through, as if through a mask (per
through and sonare- sound). So remember beauty lies in perception and perception is
internal. Whenever you feel that you are not beautiful. Stop and think about how you
can imagine, remember, enjoy, think. These actions are the beauties of humanity, of
people. Remember that without the internal you could not appreciate any perceived
external beauty. I will leave you with an idea from the Roman philosopher Marcus
Aurelius: Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a
perspective, not the truth.
your loving son,
Jace