Truth is Beauty

I came home from my travels to find two gifts waiting for me. One was a small letterpress poster from my friend Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. and the other an engraved ceramic feather with IMPRESARIO etched on it. I knew the second was a gift from Michelle Allee, an artist friend, who had read my blog.

When I was in Tucson visiting Tin, we took the Love Language quiz again. My love language is still Acts of Service, but Tin’s had morphed from when he was half the age he is now. Tin’s love language is now Quality Time and second runner up is Gifts.

I could have guessed gifts was Tin’s – he has always been an enthusiastic recipient of a gift. Gifts have never been a thing of mine, usually they make me feel a little uncomfortable, but I’ve grown into gifts, especially the kind where the gift demonstrates that the person has a sense of who I am. These are the types of gifts I love. I also love the gift of quality time spent with someone I love.

I have spent a lifetime surrounded by artists – painters, musicians, writers, designers, poets, dancers – who have given me the gift of their presence, their perspectives, their interpretations, along with their sense of beauty. These gifts have been woven into my sense of the world around me.

And then there is the gift of good friendships. Yesterday, I met three of my friends and just seeing their faces for the brief forty-five minutes we were together made me feel I was home. If you ever watched Sex in the City and looked at one of the women as she sat down at the brunch table with the other three, how she lets out a breath and knows she is safe to be who she is, you will know that is how I felt joining my friends at the table yesterday – a sense ahhhh this feels good, these women look like home.

I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades learning about who I am from the inside out, the truth of who I am, and this gift was given to me courtesy of a lot of pain in lieu of what Germans call gemütlichkeit (read: enjoyable experiences). Gemütlichkeit a great word, if you try to approximate it in English you think of an experience that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, which does not have the same perfect meaning. Gemütlichkeit reminds me of a colleague of mine from long ago who introduced me to this word. We were sitting outside in a Bavarian plaza, enjoying a glass of wine, music was playing somewhere, faint but there, half heard from inside one of the restaurants, people were talking, and the night was electric. I had been traveling on a work trip in Germany and got sick, and my colleague took me to the doctor, and he stayed in the examining room with me, which felt odd at the time – how attentive he was to me. More than seventeen years later, my colleague told me that he had been in love with me. Didn’t I see it? I hadn’t. There was pain in his truth.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” ~ John Keats

I was listening to Orna Guralnik, the psychoanalyst whose series, Couples Therapy, I’ve yet to watch, even though my friend who shares my love of anything psychoanalytic highly recommended it to me. Orna said love thrives when people are courageous enough to confront the truth. Adam, my therapist, says love is in our truth.

I’ve been on a mission to be vulnerable, to confront my truth head on and to say it aloud with no shame. I want to believe in the beauty of my truth. The truth of gifts, of friendships, of pain that burns away lies, is that it offers me a deeper and more profound connection to myself and to those I love, and in the forging is where beauty exists. And I’m here for it.

[Thank you for reading my blog, I love hearing from you;
I’d appreciate your leaving your response here on my platform rather than Metta’s.]