beholding beauty with the eye of the mind ~
he will be enabled to bring forth not images of beauty,
but reality (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality),
and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue
to become the friend of God
and be immortal, if mortal man may.
~ Plato
Last night at our bi-monthly Pig Thursday, over beer and chamomile tea, shoestring fries and peach cobbler à la mode, Girl Friday ~ now a stem-cell research scientist ~ recounted a gorgeous story from her memorable past as a hospice and palliative nurse. There was a woman who came in who had had a double mastectomy. However, rather than going the usual route and having her breasts restored through augmentation, she opted instead to have intricate, decorative tattoos entwined all over her scarred and formerly diseased flesh.
Perhaps what I love most about this woman and her choice was that, since the primary, mammary function of her breasts was nullified by cancer, she evidently didn't feel the need to restore their shape and size in order to feel feminine or attractive to the opposite sex. She didn't need her breasts to feel "whole." Instead, she reclaimed her body on her own terms, in a way that no one would generally see. Though she would spend the rest of her days as flat-chested as a boy, she now possessed the hidden, infinitely beautiful secret of having survived an unfathomable horror in a way that exemplified just what an empowered human being she had become.
What a woman.
(photo credit: Glamour Magazine)
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