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Sunday, July 9, 2017

HOW DO WE KNOW WHO WE ARE?






 Sometimes we know who we are 
by the words of others important to us.


Sometimes our sense of self
seem unrelated to how we look.


Take Ursula K. Le Guin's take on the temperaments of her favorite pets:

"Dogs don’t know what they look like. 

Dogs don’t even know what size they are. 

No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. 

My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, 

would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. 

When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused:

 “Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren’t I?” 

But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, 

under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo."






" Cats know exactly where they begin and end. 

When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, 

and pause, 

leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. 

They know you have to keep holding the door open. 

That is why their tail is there. 

It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship.

 Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters.

 When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, 

it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish

and it may work, because the dog gets confused again:

'I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?


 But do pets know they are beautiful?  
And what is beauty anyway? 


Ursula K. Le Guin had thoughts on beauty as well:

"I think of when I was in high school in the 1940s: 

the white girls got their hair crinkled up by chemicals and heat so it would curl, 

and the black girls got their hair mashed flat by chemicals and heat so it wouldn’t curl. 

Home perms hadn’t been invented yet,

 and a lot of kids couldn’t afford these expensive treatments, 

so they were wretched because they couldn’t follow the rules,

 the rules of beauty.

 Beauty always has rules. It’s a game. 

I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it 

and don’t care who they hurt. 

I hate it when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves."


What do you think 
when you see the bloated faces 
of movie and music stars 
who have used Botox 
and surgical attempts 
to cling to what they see as Beauty?

How do you define Beauty?

10 comments:

  1. Beauty has always been in the eye of the beholder. It just depends on what you're looking at. People have always told me I have beautiful eyes...when I look at them I see just plain hazel, with more wrinkles than I care to admit to.

    My father always had a saying -- Beauty is as beauty does.

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    1. Your father was right: I have known superficially pretty people who got uglier the longer I knew them! :-)

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  2. Older actresses who have used Botox look awful. It shows and it's not attractive. Just age naturally.

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    1. You would think they would look at the stretched faces of those who did Botox and shy away from it!

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  3. Never having being the most physically attractive person in the room, I've thought about this quite a bit. It came to me early in my teens that if people chose to not "like" me because of my looks then they weren't worth my time. Seeing people for who they really are beneath the external, what is in their hearts, is what matters.

    I look at people as trees. The older, the more twisted and gnarled a tree is, the more we tend to revere and love that tree. That's how I feel about humans. Every scar, every wrinkle, every twisted and bent limb, is the mark of a life lived and that person has stories to tell, lessons to teach.

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    Replies
    1. I have always believed that me being unattractive was a gift since those who liked me did so because of who not what I was. :-)

      The laugh and compassionate wrinkles around the eyes make people seem so much deeper and more real to me.

      Thanks for visiting!!

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  4. You had me in stitches with the Le Guin this morning. I'm now unable to think cat without imagining, blowfish!

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    Replies
    1. She did have a way with words, didn't she? I thought my cat and dog friends would get a kick out of her words. :-)

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  5. I think it's a shame seeing what celebrities have done to their faces with cosmetic surgery. It would be impossible to list all the stars that have ruined their features.

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