my beauty, myself
by deAnne hampton

I will be happy forever. No thing shall hinder me.I will walk with beauty above me, I will walk with beauty below me.I will walk with beauty before me, I will walk with beauty behind me.I will walk with beauty around me, I will walk with beauty within me...my whole world will be beautiful.

Can you imagine if every child were taught, along with the three R’s, that they had an inherent beauty that would be reflected in their lives just by declaring it so and accepting nothing less? Can you imagine?

Every year of the 11 that I spent in public education, I would teach the above Native American prayer to my students. I taught and was a counselor in a predominantly inner-city population, so what I see in my minds eye is a middle-class white person amid African American and Hispanic children joyfully pantomiming a Native American prayer. That, in itself, is a reflection of the beauty in this world, beauty that holds us in love and safe keeping everyday whether we own or discard it, see or are blinded to it, welcome it or deign it to be an illusion.

Today, as I find myself in the middle of this reverie about all the gifts my first career as a teacher gave to me, I can’t help but see a dichotomy between who I was then, especially living and teaching in Florida in a big city...and who I am, thankfully, today. I was really living a trickle down existence so to speak—a reference to the dress code and rules followed and tenets taught and life-style lived as that which evolved out of the status-quo versus the dreams dared.

Until I was thirty years old, I lived in a metaphor where the illusion of “someone” at the top of a very high staircase made all the important societal decisions and then sent them administratively down the steps to be followed and adhered to by the everyday flow of existence. When I remember myself in suits and panty hose and make-up that made me professionally presentable so that I could attend the right functions and perform the right protocol and teach from the exact criteria that my training had afforded me, I wonder...did I know then that that wasn’t me? I was doing the best I could and I was doing it with all my heart, but my life and image were directed from the outside, in!

Then I moved to the mountains and my life changed immeasurably. I know it was not so much about where I moved, as the decision to change the path that was given to me into the one that I chose. It was an identity altering decision that I know many are familiar with. A little voice inside of me found a point of clarity and said, ENOUGH!

I got my apartment through the mail and came by myself to a place I had never been, and knew no one. And providence has been guiding me ever since. As I continue to observe my own and the lessons of so many endeavoring to follow that inner voice, the painstaking process and path of our becoming seem to be leading to the same place...union with our Self. The big AHA is when our outer world and everyday lives become a spill-over of the reservoir of riches within: the Truth of who we are and the love we are here to extend. When the personality is finally ready to align with the soul, after the kicking and screaming and clueless periods of trying oh so hard to fit in to the acceptable mold of what has always been, we realize that the beauty of who we really are lies within. And it is waiting for us to just be that beauty and to see it reflected not only in the mirror, but in the way we walk through each day and gift ourselves back to the world.