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Nina Tovish
Beauty Can Save Your Life
You've heard the saying "beauty is skin deep," I suppose. It's true: but only for the kind of shallow glitz that sells fashion magazines and the movie star du jour.
I'd like to propose that real beauty is SOUL deep, and it can save your life. Human beings are not only self-aware, pattern-finding, and meaning-making animals, but we are also by our very nature aesthetes. We look for and respond to the beautiful. Those pre-historic cave paintings didn't have to be incredibly beautiful, but they are!
Learning to seek and see beauty in our ordinary environment can remake our daily lives. Patients in hospitals who have beautiful views or wonderful pictures on the wall recover faster. By training ourselves to appreciate and then perhaps even to create beauty every day, we transform what was previously merely tolerated into something beautiful to celebrate. Real beauty contributes to our survival and to our moral growth. It evokes wonder, gratitude, the desire to take care of and share it with others, and a desire to create and contribute.
"Have nothing in your home that you do not believe to be beautiful or know to be useful." — William Morris.
About Nina Tovish:
Nina Tovish has been an artist of one kind or another for most of her life: including her professional work in photography, web design, and now textile design (http://www.quellebelle.com).
