Musings of a Poet

Lori Garner with her drawing, "Defacement" and Marjorie Chesebro with her poem, "Beauty."

BEAUTY

The city is pulsating with people

of all cultures, races and creeds . . .

One homeless woman with small dog

bears a sign indicating

she wishes to be loved

despite being ugly

Beauty – in the eye of the beholder

The calm before the storm

Are we conditioned to love only beautiful things?

The misfit . . .the outcast . . .

the rebel . . .the cursed . . .

Unlovable because they are not

the aesthetically pleasing norm

Who sets this impossible standard of beauty?

The hungry . . .the homeless . . .

the hurried . . .the hurting . . .

All major world religions teach

“Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Self-love becomes the

prerequisite to loving others

If the mirror does not

reflect a beautiful face

Where then does that

leave my neighbor?

© 2015 Marjorie Chesebro

All rights reserved

This is my Enneagram Type 5 card. The panda image symbolizes the Five’s slow, deliberate and methodical style. Yet Fives have an appreciation for the beauty around them as symbolized by the flower. Fives thirst for knowledge as symbolized by the reading woman and the dreamy woman is the Five with a Four wing – the Romantic. The leopard image symbolizes the mysteriousness, stealth and prowess of the Five and that their strength is often underestimated. The eyes of the leopard are bright and shiny to symbolize the observer quality of the Five and that the eyes are the window to the soul. Finally, the image of the angel is of my mother, a Type 9, who passed away in 2011. Her spirit is forever present with me – it is a calm, compassionate, and understanding presence.

As the old saying goes, "SUCCESS HAS MANY FATHERS, BUT FAILURE IS AN ORPHAN."

"We are born of love; Love is our Mother."  ~ Rumi

"Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything,

your pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for love and wisdom."

~ Rumi

"Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

~ Elie Wiesel in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

"[Writing is] being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page."

~  Mary Gaitskill

"Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

~ Leonard Cohen

"For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction."

~ Cynthia Occelli

"Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it."

~ Dorothy Day