Beautiful Berkeley

Well, I'm sitting in Caffe Mediterraneum in Berkeley, CA right now trying to get all my work done before I get back to good old L.A. I can tell you right now that that is not going to happen, but what is happening as I write is the thought that people are beautiful because they have souls.

Just about everyone has heard the stereotypical nickname for Berkeley "Bizerkley" and I just realized, not for the first time, that there is something dangerous in stereotypes. They prevent you from seeing what is really there. Stereotypes tell you what you're seeing, they take away your freedom of interpretation (to a certain extent).

For instance, if a person had never been to Berkeley before but had heard about all the strange kind of people who live here, they would possibly feel that there is no reason to go to Berkeley since they already "know" what's there. Or, perhaps, they would visit Berkeley and only see enough of it to justify and prove the stereotype they have heard. It takes a rare person to hear of a stereotype, see the stereotype and still look deeper. As I've tried to do that over the last few hours as I walked from Crepevine to Amoeba to Moes and finally to Caffe Med I've seen some incredibly beautiful people that everyone else seems to glance over.

I know I'm as guilty of this "glancing over" as the next person is so I'm not trying to bash on anyone who's done it; but I am trying to bring to light the fact that there is something in every human being that makes them beautiful, whether you're attracted to them aesthetically or not. I think it's the same thing that makes each person so uniquely different. There's a light in a person's eyes that doesn't quite shine exactly the same as the light in everyone else's eyes.

Growing up I heard the phrase, "The eyes are the window to the soul" and I think that's exactly true in this instance. And, I think, it is this glimpse you get when you look into a person's eyes that makes them beautiful. Their innermost being, not what they cloth themselves with, is what makes them beautiful. I can say that, "God created man in His own image" and that's why we, as living souls are beautiful, because we have been made in likeness to Him who is Beauty. You may ask me to defend my self on that claim and I will, gladly, but not in this post. The point of this post is to point out the fact that aesthetics are not what make a person beautiful, aesthetics are merely the things that attract different kinds of people to other people and things.

My question then, is this: How or why are aesthetics a reflection or interpretation of beauty? Why do we feel a need to create aesthetics? Is it because it is the only way we can express the beauty we know is within ourselves?

I have my own thoughts on this but I would like to hear what you think? Do you disagree with anything I've said? Would you take anything I've said to an even further extreme? Please let me know what you think about this, because the thing with thought projects is that they don't really work so well when you only have one train of thought contributing to the project. Help me out, help me think on a bigger or different scale.

A Mystery

My question for today (and please do answer it) is really simple. Do you think you could live without any beauty in your life and your interactions with the world?

For the Love of all things Beautiful

Poetry is one of the most widely accepted forms of created beauty. Whether you enjoy poetry or not, you know it is considered beautiful and is used when trying to romance someone.

Plato said in his Symposium, "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet."

What is it, do you think, that connects love and beauty together so strongly?