A Meditation on beauty
Written by Kelly Herring
A few weeks ago I visited a friend who has three children under the age of six. The four- and five-year-olds were dazzling me with their acrobatic skills, somersaulting and standing on their heads with their legs propped on the back of the couch. Smiling at their youthful antics, I decided to wow them with my own skills. I claimed that I could stand on my head without the help of the couch. Intrigued, they demanded to see my great feat, so I knelt on the floor and carefully assumed my yoga pose, balancing on my head and forearms while my legs stretched high into the air. My young friends were duly astonished! After this demonstration, the little boy and girl did not leave my side. We did cartwheels together outside and made plans for a future nature walk when the weather turned cooler.
In the days that followed this visit, I read Edna Ferber’s So Big. I watched how young people all around Selina were drawn to her. Roelfe and Dallas, as well as unnamed neighbors, are drawn to her for advice and comfort. Selina demonstrates the magnetism of beauty that I want to emulate. For much of my adult life, I have wrestled with the idea of womanhood and how a woman can age with grace and beauty. Why is it that some women grow ever more beautiful with each passing year while others do not?
While reading So Big, I was also finishing a 28-day exercise plan in which I learned the incredible headstand.1 Both Ferber and Hittleman deal with the subject of beauty and aging. Hittleman writes, “Genuine beauty is all-encompassing and is present not only in physical appearance but in movement, voice, thought and feeling.” 2 In order to cultivate beauty, a woman must nourish all three aspects of her being: body, mind, and soul. This is what Selina does throughout her life. She works hard physically, making her muscles strong and her body lean. She reads books, articles, and magazines, making her mind teem with creative ideas. She feeds her soul by relishing the beauty of the natural world.
By the end of the novel, no one would claim that Selina is glamorous or Hollywood pretty. No. Her time working with the earth tans her face and hands and dries out her hair, but this work also lights up her eyes and makes her walk with surety and grace. Selina’s posture and physical agility mark her with something difficult to describe, an attraction of some sort, “something arresting, something compelling,” something felt by those who interacted with her, an inherent magnetism. 3 This “something” is so apparent that her friend Julie complains, “I don’t see how you do it!…Your eyes are as bright as a baby’s and mine look like dead oysters.” 4
Selina grows more and more attractive with every passing chapter and decade because she is busy making something beautiful. The beauty she recognizes in chapter two— “Mile after mile of cabbage fields, jade-green against earth. Mile after mile of red cabbage, a rich plummy Burgundy veined with black. Between these, heaps of corn were piled-up sunshine” –this beauty grows in her very hands as she transforms a mediocre truck farm into a place that produces the most beautiful and sought-after fruits and vegetables in all of Chicago. 5
As much as we may not like it, physical exertion is good for us, especially when the effort produces beauty. Creative toil also makes us more interesting; for, how many uninteresting people labor to make beautiful things? As we work to make something else beautiful, the beauty seeps into us. It is this that Dallas O’Malley recognizes in Selina, in “that fine splendid face all lit up with the light that comes from inside.” 6 By this time, Selina is in her fifties, so when Dallas describes her beauty, we know that it is not the Hollywood version of beauty but the real, lasting version that a woman cultivates in quiet toil.
Selina fosters lasting beauty by nurturing every part of herself, body, mind, and soul. That is the secret to lasting beauty. When we neglect the nourishment of our bodies, minds, and souls, something in us diminishes; ugliness seeps in. When we cultivate and care for each part of ourselves, we become more receptive to the beauty around us and more capable of bringing beauty into the world.
Just as I finished reading So Big, I encountered a friend nearing her ninetieth birthday. I had not seen her since she was my Sunday school teacher ten years ago. That Sunday, as I sat waiting for the church service to begin, I looked up and saw Mrs. Peggy making her way toward me. Her face was alight with joy, her eyes sparkled with love and recognition. She walked with ease without the aid of a walker or cane. She smiled wide and true and embraced me in a fierce hug, saying she had missed me. When we finally let go of each other and stepped back, my broad smile matched hers as I took in the simple joy, pleasure, and beauty of seeing my friend again.
“You are beautiful,” I told her.
In my mind, those three words held all the gravitas, honor, and significance of my month-long meditation on beauty.
About Kelly Herring
Kelly Herring lives in north Mississippi with her husband and their two children, one biological son and one goddaughter. She has a Master’s Degree in Literature from Florida State University. If you stop by for a visit, you may catch her in the middle of befriending the wild box turtles that live in her spacious backyard, reading, writing, baking, soap-making, sewing or preparing to teach a class.
About Well-Read Mom
In Well-Read Mom, women read more and read well. Our hope is to deepen the awareness of meaning hidden in each woman’s daily life, elevate the cultural conversation, and revitalize reading literature from books. If you would like to have us help you select worthy reading material, we invite you to join and read along with us. We are better together! For information on how to start or join a Well-Read Mom group visit our website wellreadmom.com
