The Beauty Experiment

I have been thinking about this since yesterday morning, rearranging things in my mind's attic trying to find the end to the tangled thread of thoughts around this subject.  I never did find it, but I'm not going to let that stop me.

First of all I am a fat woman in Middle America.  I watch Project Runway.  I see Vogue.  I have endured some time on match.com.  So trust me, the cultural notion of beauty is familiar to me.  I know I look nothing like the women our culture deem beautiful.  I also know that I AM beautiful.  Therefore, one of us must be wrong.

This is where science chica rears her sleep-filled vacation head and mutter something about doing an experiment to see which view is correct.  Then she falls back into the pillow face first and returns to making her soft snorgeling sounds.

What a wonderful idea!

Any experiment begins with a hypothesis

I hypothesize that beauty is common, that it is everywhere and that we step over or rush past a million breath-taking things every day.

Next comes data collection that refutes or supports my hypothesis.

So my goal for January is to find one thing every day that I find beautiful and post it here.  Could be a thought or a photo or a joke.  I may not hit every day.  The goal here is to try to document things that I find beautiful.  You won't find a single supermodel on the list.  Yes, they are beautiful, but they are NOT the only form that beauty takes in the world.  I want my eyes to stop singularly focusing on one kind of beauty.

I blame this small holly bush for the whole shebang.  It was sitting in front of the bank where I had to shell out a large chunk of change to pay my county taxes.  Hence, I was not in a stellar mood.  This little bush stopped me in my tracks.  The roof melt had over dripped the gutter onto this small bush encasing it in ice.  It was the perfect winter storm of red and green and transparent ice.  I stood there photographing it while customers came in and out of the bank.  Most glared at the crazy woman standing in the cold with her iPhone out taking pictures of a bush, but one older gentleman stopped next to me, looked at the bush I was photographing and whispered conspiratorially "It really is quite lovely."

I wanted to hug him, invite him to tea and do an impromptu waltz right there in the snow in front of this staid suburban bank.  Instead I smiled up at him and told him he had a good eye.

When I walked into the bank, I wasn't miffed anymore.  I was lightly happy.  All because of a little ice covered shrub with red berries.  A little shrub did that.  Giselle Bundchen never did that for me.  Not even close.  The cool thing is that I will never see this little holly bush that I don't remember how beautiful it was on this one day.

And it will just make me smile.


Oh.....and feel free to add your own beauty observations in the comments.  A good experiment is always made better by more data.  Especially when sampling biologicals.  And Honey, we ARE some biologicals.