Current Western pop culture is limiting our ability to see beauty. Paraphrased, someone once said enlightenment is the ability to see beauty in all things. I personally can’t define enlightenment, but I know learning to see beauty is a skill that requires development and we should develop it.
Leonardo Da Vinci has a sketch known as the Vitruvian Man.
Although made famous Renaissance artist Leonardo Da Vinci, the figure known as the Vitruvian Man is actually named for the man who created him, the Roman architect Vitruvius. Vitruvius, a proponent of the Sacred Geometry of Pythagoras, designed temples based on the proportions of the human body, believing them to be perfect. This perfection, wrote Vitruvius, was due to the fact that the extended limbs of a perfectly proportioned human fit into both the circle and the square.
Wikipedia has a higher resolution photo of the sketch.
I want to take Da Vinci’s drawing a put a large red circle around it with a big red slash through the middle. I object to the idea that perfect proportions apply to people. But our modern Western consciousness has seized on one version of ideal beauty. For females, it often involves being Caucasian, blonde, blue-eyed and skinny. We are bombarded by these images. When a heroine of pop culture gains a few pounds, she is lambasted in the pop media.
It makes us feel like we lack beauty, that we are not the children of a beautiful God. We might have longer legs than average or shorter legs than average. I know this since from a former hobby; setting up bicycles for racing. Precise leg length measurements are important to prevent overuse injuries. I know that my legs are shorter than average for a person of my height and of my torso length. In fact nearly every one in my father’s family has the same proportions. And this fact always used to bug me.
I recently took a picture of a friend of mine and when I showed it to her; she wanted me to delete it. She said it made her legs look too long. In fact she expressed a lot of displeasure at how long her legs were. My friend is beautiful, both inside and out. And I couldn’t believe that she was so focused on an aspect that she perceived as a flaw. I’m sure there are people who would kill to have legs that long.
We have to learn to see the beauty in all proportions, colors of skin, ethnic backgrounds, and all types of other human features. The beauty is not in the object we look at, but in the way we look. This is a skill that must be learned.
There are other things that have beauty that I think are acquired tastes. Impressionist art, Jazz, beer are all things that people do not take to right away. They have to develop their eye, or their ear or their palate to appreciate the beauty.
I want all of you to start developing your beauty for people… all people.
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