Astrological Beauty Buff (Patreon)

Whoever asks what beauty is has usually already decided it is a possession, something a person has, either grown on him like a feature or handed down to him like a fortune, and that is the first error, the one all the others are built on, so let us knock it down before laying a single stone. Beauty is not owned. It is not one feature among the features, not a fortunate arrangement of the face, because the face is only the stage, and nobody, leaving a great performance, congratulates the floorboards.

What we call a beautiful person is a person in whom life has kept more than it spent. There are those who arrive at thirty, at fifty, at whatever age you like, already paid out, having handed themselves over in small denominations to fear and to habit, and there are others, rarer, the ones everyone turns toward without knowing why, who carry a surplus, an excess of existence the body cannot entirely contain, and so it shows - in the walk, in the voice, in the temperature of a glance. Beauty is that overflow becoming visible. Nothing more mystical than this, and nothing less.

Which quietly settles the question of its opposite, and the mirror-frightened have it wrong. The opposite of beauty is exhaustion. A face does not fail by being built badly, it fails the way a hearth fails, going cold while remaining, stone for stone, exactly where it stood. The world is full of correct faces that are cold hearths, and full of irregular ones where something is still burning, and only a bookkeeper prefers the first.

Now, nothing overflows that was not first filled, so the surplus has a history. It was earned, though rarely on purpose. Goodness practiced long enough stops being conduct and becomes constitution, patience kept past a certain year turns into a way of standing, what a person did quietly in some earlier season comes up later through the skin, the way a harvest declares, in autumn, decisions made in spring by someone who has since forgotten making them. What glows in the flesh is the past, ripened. This is also why it cannot be purchased, and why the industries that promise otherwise are selling autumn to people who skipped the planting.

Proportion matters the way tuning matters. An even body is a tuned instrument: it transmits faithfully, distorts nothing, and produces, by itself, in its locked case, not a single note. Necessary, then, and mute.

Beauty does not finish inside the beautiful. It finishes in you. When such a person crosses a room and your attention leaves without asking your permission, no theft has occurred, no matter what the old poets plead in their defense. A string was struck nearby, and a string inside you, tuned by whatever life you have managed to live, answered on its own, the way one bell wakes another across a valley. Beauty is not the note. It is the chord, and a chord requires two, which means it never belonged to either. This is why beauty can feel so subjective at times, also. 

With this you can see beauty is surplus life made visible, a past that ripened into presence, sounding through a form even enough not to muffle it, and completed only when it finds, in a stranger, or around it, a string that answers.

This works on what makes you beautiful, not merely on where it shows. Expect improvement, but let it choose its place and pace. The effects are broad because the source is.

Audio + Image.