You Are Beautiful: Marc Gafni
“You are Beautiful!”
Before Soul Prints came out, I was at a New York publishing house, presenting the book proposal. Half a dozen professionals were seated around a stretch limo type of an oak table looking very official, sharp, literarily daunting and not very loving. I escaped to the bathroom for a moment’s breath before I went “on.” After all, this was “important” and I had to put on my best face. That is what were taught; I grew up in the States and am no exception. Glancing in the mirror on my way out, I was caught by a sticker plastered audaciously across the mirror. It read “You are beautiful!” Bless the human being who had placed that sticker there. I said to myself, “Marc, you don’t have to put on a face. The face you have is just fine.”
It is a funny thing about us meager mortals. The hardest thing to be in the world is what others want you to be. And yet we spend years trying to do it. The easiest thing to be in the world is to just be yourself.
Anyway, standing before that mirror was an epiphany moment, pure and simple. I was not going to deny my divinity — the Holy of Holies that was my face — just for a bunch of guys wearing masks in a conference room in Manhattan. Besides, underneath those masks they are probably loving teddy bears who want to show their faces too. The sticker, hovering there above my reflection, gave me such a sense of elation that when I got back to the stuffy conference room I took off my shoes and started walking across that stretch limo-like oak table…just because it was what the beautiful in me wanted to do. The fact that my agent Mitchel wanted to murder me afterwards is a topic for my next book on rage and shadow!
The most important thing we can ever tell someone else is, “You are beautiful.” We were all made conveniently equipped with built-in mirrors — our eyes. They are the reflecting pool in which the person before us beholds herself. It is up to us to choose what she will see reflected there. To be a lover is to try to follow the example of the mirror in the Manhattan high-rise and make sure that whoever looks into your mirroring eyes will feel the embracing energy of “You are beautiful”. What a wonderful way to live! Spiritual tradition reminds us of what we often forget in the doldrums and tensions of the day-to-day. That is, that everyone is beautiful, and furthermore, that everyone is uniquely beautiful.
Every human being on the face of the planet holds in his or her essence an utterly unique reflection of the infinite beauty of God. We can respond to the biblical invitation to “love everyone” by perceiving and honoring this light in all who cross our path. Lovers see infinity dancing in the looking glass of each other’s eyes. We need to become lovers again. It will make it all so different. And we want to. We all love being lovers. We have simply forgotten to look. We have forgotten to perceive that we are all stepping gently through God’s magnificent museum. Each soul we behold — a perfect masterpiece.
marc gafni
posted on marcgafni.com
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