Beautiful

Beautiful (adj.) beau·ti·ful \ˈbyü-ti-fəl\: 

Having a quality or aggregate of qualities

 that gives pleasure to the senses or 

pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit

In case you didn't know, I'm a cancer survivor. Every cancer is different, but the particular kind of breast cancer that was discovered at my (fortunately) very early diagnosis almost 10 years ago now is aggressive, destructive, and fast-growing. As a result, treatment for me was comprehensive. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, drug treatments--whatever we had, we threw at it. I'm luckier than many; my prognosis was good, and my chances of recurrence are low. But my body still bears the marks of the battle.

I've graduated now, finally, to annual follow-up mammograms. It's nice to go less often, but even so, I have been there so much that the routine is familiar. You put on the gown, and answer all the same questions. And then, before the 20 minutes of freezing cold and pain and pressure and holding your breath first because you're told and then because you can't breathe and then again until you hear someone say cheerily from behind the screen of images "Looks good!", there is the moment when you will mark your scar. To clearly identify your scar tissue on the scan, lest it be mistaken for something more ominous, a tiny wire will be shaped and taped along the length of your surgical scar, marking it out for the techs and doctors who will view the films.

At my latest appointment, not that many weeks ago, after the gown and the questions and the rest, the nurse who was prepping me finished her notes, packed up her paperwork, and said briskly, "All right, now let's see your scar."  I lifted the gown in the now-familiar motion, turned and gestured so that she could see, and her businesslike bustle came to an abrupt halt as she drew in her breath and just stared for a moment. "Oh my god," she said. "That's beautiful."

It isn't the first time someone has had that response to my scar. Actually, it's never once been shown to a nurse, doctor, lab tech, or any other medical professional without getting that response, and it's because they know what they are looking at. But if you are not a scar professional, if you don't know what you're seeing when you look at my scar, or at any scar, you might be tempted to look at it as just the opposite of beautiful. Scars are just one of the many things that we often view as physical faults or imperfections--things that destroy beauty.

In my past, I was given that message--that the scar was a flaw, a blemish, something to be ashamed of, something that ruined me. That it made me unlovable. That it destroyed my value. But I am learning, slowly, over time, that it is a thing of beauty. I have had great love and care given to me in my life, have walked through deep valleys, have experienced enormous good fortune. The scar tells all those stories. If I foolishly wished it away, I would erase with it all the power and love its story holds.

I know this is true, because it is true for others besides me. I think of the little one dear to me, and the birthmark that is simply a testimony to the miracle of her existence. Of my own two boys, and all the bumps and scars and faded marks that are the witness to the adventures of their childhood. Of the partner in my life now, and those deep, crinkly laugh lines around his eyes, which cannot come overnight, but tell the story of a life lived oriented toward joy. The marks on our bodies are the marks of our lives. All these things we view negatively, and too often, we can begin to view ourselves negatively because of them, yet all the imperfections that we believe mar us, mark us, are actually the things that illuminate us.

Once upon a time, I was often told that to find me beautiful would require changing the definition of the word; and this, unknowingly, was a profound truth. There is a distortion running deep in our society, a stunted definition of beauty that revolves around an artificial, superficial flawlessness. But if we cannot see beauty in those around us, we are using a faulty definition. A true beauty is found in the stretch marks that tell the story of the birth of our children, the calluses and bruises of hard work done well, and even the generous waistlines that speak of good food, warm hospitality, and time well spent with family and friends. It's found in scars, those stories of battles that have been fought and won, and of those who carried us through them, of things greatly dared and bravely endured, of adventures that have changed us and that define us. These are moments and memories that could not be traded for a superficial snapshot or a slimmer silhouette. These are the beauty marks, the marks of all that matter. This is beautiful.

Monarch

I have never been much of a flowers-and-frills, sunshine and butterfly type of girl, but I love the monarch. 

I first learned to love them from my grandmother, and my mother--as a child, it was simply a routine activity to scout yards and fields, pastures and road ditches, looking for milkweed plants and their tiny inhabitants, the caterpillars that we would take home, house, feed, watch, and eventually release to their new lives. I learned how to recognize the eggs and capture them before the caterpillars had even hatched. I learned how to collect the milkweed leaves and keep them fresh in the refrigerator, and how to use nylon stockings to make the perfect breathable jar lid that doubled as a safe place to attach a chrysalis. Grandma showed me how to use sugar water on a cotton ball to feed the butterflies once they had hatched, until they were ready to leave and fly. 

Once I had children of my own, I passed this part of my childhood on, and my boys became avid monarch caterpillar collectors. The large jars with their homemade lids, the Ziploc bags full of leaves in the refrigerator door, the kamikaze missions to the nearby road ditches for supplies, all became a normal part of the rhythm of our household; and as I've grown older, my love for the monarch has grown and deepened too, as I've come to understand the profound mystery behind its magic.

Often, you will hear people talking about how a butterfly "makes" a chrysalis or a cocoon. But the monarch, like other butterflies, doesn't actually make a chrysalis. (And, a bonus PSA, cocoons are made by moths. Not butterflies. No, not ever.) The chrysalis is not a constructed thing, it is a developmental stage. It is the pupa stage in the life cycle of a butterfly. The monarch, as you can see in the video above, does not make the chrysalis--he simply sheds his skin to reveal it. He has shed his skin many times before, and this last time we see what he has always known, that the chrysalis has been there the whole time, underneath it all.

What does this mean, then, to the story that the caterpillar will go inside a cocoon, this hiding place that he has constructed, and inside, through some secret process of transformation, he will become a butterfly, and then come out? Well, it blows the entire idea out of the water. If the chrysalis is not the caterpillar's construction, but is simply his next stage of becoming, then it is not a hiding place for transformation, but a part of it--what you become while you are becoming a butterfly. We can see that this is true because the chrysalis, far from being a shield that conceals transformation, only to reveal it when it reaches completion, actually becomes more and more clear as transformation takes place, allowing all to see the butterfly inside. And when he sheds his skin, that hard chrysalis shell now thin and brittle, for the final time, there can be no doubt--this is what he has been becoming from the beginning.

So if you are in the process today of transformation, as indeed we all are, understand that transformation is a process that happens from within. We are transformed, as my own Great Story says, by the renewing of our minds--or, as Eugene Peterson puts it in his own translation The Message, "You'll be changed from the inside out." As we grow, we will shed our old skins again and again, and this may even be painful at times, may even require help from those who love us, as in my most dearly loved passage of the Narnia stories, where Aslan's sharp claws dig deep to strip the layers of dragon skin away until only the boy, Eustace, can be seen. But eventually, be seen we will, because what we are becoming is already inside us. The caterpillar skin sheds to reveal the chrysalis, and the chrysalis skin splits to release the butterfly, and by this we know the mystery of the monarch:

The butterfly is inside the caterpillar all along. 

There is no need to worry if right at this moment what is seen may not seem, to the unknowing onlooker, to be worthy--if it looks ugly, or plain, or unfinished, or if it's hard to see the beauty. There is no need to hide our transformation away from the world until it's complete. Everything we will be is inside us, and we are only in the process of becoming.