Allow me to introduce to you my friend Catherine Love.
We first met at one of my show when I was performing in Brighton at a Fund Raiser for our mutual and departed friend Lynn Hazleden. We have been friends ever since, thanks largely to Social Media, however, our connection has been rooted in deep friendship, respect and love for each other. When I started this project, I knew I wanted Catherine to feature, because if you read any of her post on Facebook, you will experience truth in her words. When you meet her in person, she is 100% congruent in her offline personality and self expression. Today, we met up and enjoyed a wonderful conversation about Beauty. These conversations always, and I mean ALWAYS open up further dialogue around relationships, family, childhood. At times it can get quite confronting. With Catherine, I experienced a woman who has had to endure a quite a bit of challenges in life. I asked her how does she cope? in her own words; "I try to find something to laugh and smile about”. Right there, you can see a woman who has a very positive relationship to life. As she said to me today; "Life doesn't happen to us, we happen to life". My experience of Catherine today was one of joy and reverence for life. She has reached a point in her journey where she recognised that she has been the creator of all that has occurred in her life. She now is walking the path of reclaiming her identity and celebrating herself, her family on her own terms. Look at her photograph above. What do you see? The energy her exudes, would say she is sad, resigned and cynical about life? I wouldn't. As soon as I created this image in camera, I knew this was the look and expression I wanted from her. We both discovered something, she cannot help smiling. Smiling is Catherine's unique and default gift to the world. How can you feel sad when she drops one of those smiles on you? No way. This is Catherine Love, love by name, love by nature and this authentic expression of hers is a wonderful gift to the world. We are blessed to have someone in our world who is so generous in sharing this part of themselves with us. She is my friend and I am proud to call her my friend. x
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Today I have spent an amazing couple hours with my good friend Mike Vincent who has been doing a project on what beauty means to me...We discussed something that I have shared recently about how over-attachment to our beliefs of how things should be versus how they really are can make us toxic to ourselves and to others. When beliefs become a part of our identity, we can even become abusive...To know beauty is to respect it, many see it in women and not in men because we relate it to visual appearance only. Today I saw beauty in the heart of a very genuine kind and respectful man, so you see, beauty exists not just in how we look but how we are, beauty truly exists in the heart and soul. it exists in our ability to really look at each other and know each other honestly and with a deep respect because ultimately we are simply reflections of each other. We discussed how all of our past relationships with our parents and past loves colours our judgement of new friendships and relationships, and in this, we can lose some of its pureness. love must be pure and untainted or we feel we must cling to it and own it and in so doing we suffocate it. Just like when we look at a flower. If we pick it, it dies, similarly, with love, it has to be set free and be allowed to be pure and unconditional. Trying to cling to something with fear in our hearts changes that pureness. I am at a time in my life where I want to love freely and without expectations, without having to own it, to let be as it is...Here online people tend to fail to see the true beauty of that mirror of life. Online we can observe how two people with differing opinions lose some of this pureness within themselves. The person who is attached to his/her beliefs of ownership of others will feel threatened and will attack in either a direct or passive aggressive way. Examples abound on FB. People will often start psychological warfare after seeing a viewpoint they disagree with. Their intention isn't to discuss or to learn but rather to win a war and to prove they're "right." This is merely a reflection of what happens in real life. Such behaviour has its roots in fear (and a fragile or obese ego). At a deep level, they're actually afraid that the opposing opinion could be true, thus threatening to shatter their view of the world and of themselves. The second issue with over-attachment to our beliefs is that it can block our growth. Updating our beliefs is an essential part of our development. Imagine being stuck with the same beliefs we internalized as a child. Our growth would be stunted. True intelligence is being able to change, evolve and adapt. This often requires dropping our defensiveness, opening our minds and truly listening to a view that may have more wisdom than ours. So when we stubbornly clutch to outdated, unhealthy beliefs and reject another's view, we're harming both ourselves and others. We're ultimately paralyzing our evolution and maturation and restricting our expansion and losing some of that naturalness that beauty radiates outwards from us towards others x Thank you Mike for the opportunity to show a little bit of me and thank you for being the reflection I love to see in the people that I love dearly.. and I do... x
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August 2018
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