The voice of the pheasant;
How I longed
For my dead parents!
~Bashō
“Hello, I’m a fat person, fat, fat, fat,” gibes a six-year-old girl playing with the new concept curvy Barbie doll at Mattel headquarters. The girl’s focus group peers bolster her audacity with laughter.
“She didn’t like going to school because she was bullied. She was telling me that girls were saying she was fat and talking about her scars from her transplant.” The mother of Nicole Lovell, a thirteen year old girl murdered by an accused Virginia Tech student whom she had met online, added that Nicole often cried, asking to stay home from school.
We have been duped. The usurpation of Beauty by our obsession with physical beauty is insanity. We have bowed to the moon and proclaimed it the Universe, living in darkness sans perspective, worshipping the tiny moon of a single planet, unconscious of stars and galaxies, estranged even from the warmth and light of our own Sun. We have made the temporal flesh our master and under its relentless rule our children suffer; we all suffer.
Baby Honey died yesterday. “Baby Honey,” an apparent misnomer, as she was the sovereign grown-up and her temperament was not an easy and recognizable sweet. Baby Honey was a strong, old-fashioned, hat-wearing, proper, church-going, God-loving woman. And yet, as I mine memory, I realize that her name is indeed fitting, for thoughts of Baby Honey are inseparable from the sweet, verdant scent of Easter Sunday.