do i love you beacuse you are beautiful, or are you beautiful because i love you?

Every girl wants to be beautiful, right? So does every woman. I've wondered for a while now what beautiful means. The dictionary says that beauty excites the senses, especially sight. That doesn't help too much. Don't even bother looking around our media/culture asking what beautiful is, or you'll be miserable forever. So I asked myself, what is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen? I came up with this:



I know the picture cannot possibly do it justice, so I'll try and tell a little bit of the story. We decided to climb the belltower in Florence, all the way up to the top. It was over 400 stairs set in a spiral staircase. Aside from the physical nightmare, the space was closed in and stone and dark, and the longer you were on the stairs the dizzier you felt. The city was hot and muggy, and you couldn't see the sky, and the stairs were worse. But then you got to the top, you bursted into the sky. It felt like the streets and the stairs and the dust and heat were very far away. I felt separate from everything I had ever known. All that existed up there was the rain-smell, and the breeze, and the quiet. It was soft and gentle, but at the same time it was exciting, it was calling me out, challenging me to feel and to be. Somehow those little red roofs and narrow, winding streets, and the blue mountains and the grey sky added up into something that was bigger and stronger and more beautiful than my life had ever been.

We spent an hour just standing on the roof, letting everything soak in. I wish I could explain to you how it changed me. It restored me, it strengthened me, it stretched me out and made me bigger. When I walked into that building I was happy, but it was in spite of sadness. When I left, I was joyous. Not giddy, but full of joy that has met and known agony, and has found something more powerful than pain could ever be.

Ever since that day, I have been trying to figure out what that something was. What could be so restful and challenging at the same time, safe yet dangerous, so gloriously heartbreaking? It was beauty, real beauty. Not make-up and hair color and a dress size 2 beauty. The kind of beauty that doesn't belong in this world, the beauty that will outlive every ugliness ever known. It calms your heart and brings it to life at the same time. God-beauty.

And if you are a woman, and it doesn't matter if you're a little woman or an old woman, this is part of you. The beauty that was in those little roofs and blue mountains is nothing compared to the beauty that is in you. You can't buy it, bottle it, preserve it with exercise, or lose it with age. And believe me, I have my share of self-esteem issues. But I know what I am made of. I know that I am beautiful.

So the next time you feel fat and ugly, don't look at a magazine, don't turn on the TV, but look outside. Look at the millions and millions of stars, look at the sun when it rises and sets. Remember the most heart-breakingly beautiful thing you have ever seen and be reassured. Because it has nothing on you.