at the beginning of the year, i started a conversation about beauty.

i had been wanting to talk about beauty for a long time, but there were things in the way. i talked about some of them.

i thought that post was just the beginning and that i would continue the conversation. after all, i think about beauty all the time. after all, i have lots of things i want to tell you about beauty.

and yet here we are, nine months later, and i haven’t continued the conversation at all.

i knew something was in the way, but i didn’t know what it was.

until the moment i did.

it turns out that i can’t talk about beauty because i’m not beautiful.

this seems like such a puzzling reason.

for one: physical beauty, as defined by other people or society or culture, or by our impression of ourself based on those definitions, is not what i want to talk about at all. it is completely unrelated to what i am thinking about when i think about beauty. i talked about this in the initial conversation.

for two: one of the things i believe to be true of beauty is that it is a quality of the soul and, as such, we are all beautiful. it seems the height of hubris to imagine that i am somehow the one exception.

the good thing about letting the unconscious become conscious is that often, those thoughts dissolve in the light of day. this was one of them. i wrote this in my journal on wednesday and immediately followed it with a number of blog posts about beauty. i felt moved to share this before i begin. again.