THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FLOWER IN THE WORLD

I love roses. I am somewhat obsessed with them. They are an indispensable item on my grocery list each week, and in true Saadi fashion, I would sooner go without bread than without their intoxicating beauty in my home.

But were I taken to task, I would have to admit that the Pansy is actually my favorite flower of all time. And the most beautiful flower in the world.

The power and fascination of roses is indeed unparalleled in the flower universe.  They are unapologetic in their beauty, and their heady fragrance has a way of inciting my imagination in a mere moment.  But pansies….pansies have a power of a different sort for me.  While the rose proclaims loudly “Behold me, for I am beautiful!!!” the Pansy simply whispers in the silent corners of my heart, “Listen, while I tell you about True Beauty.”

And with this quiet invitation, memories come flooding in of a scene that repeated itself time and again–almost like clockwork–in my childhood.

We moved around a lot when I was growing up.  Six different elementary schools before 5th grade.  We had the process almost down to a science.  By the time I was in Jr. High I had achieved expert-status in “How to use household linens and towels to pack the kitchen breakables” and “How to make new friends in the middle of the school year.”  Leaving one place and the new batch of friends found there was always hard, but I got good at it. Moving was just part of life. Or at least our life.

There was a very strict protocol we always followed as soon as we moved into a new place.  There were so many variables that changed with each new move, but this “tradition” never varied.  Moving-In Day  was always a hectic blur of people I didn’t know showing up early in the morning and forming a human chain to transfer the precious contents of the U-Haul truck into the waiting, empty rooms of our new house. The beds were set up by strangers so we wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor, and then we searched through the labyrinth of brown recyled-grocery-store cardboard boxes to find the ones that contained the two item critical for surviving the next 12 hours with 3 small children: clean underwear for everyone, and bowels for cereal.  And then Moving-In Day concluded as we all collapsed in sheer exhaustion and slept in our clothes on sheet-less beds.

But it is what always happened the very next morning that makes me pause and smile every time I see the tie-died face of a pansy.  As soon as the cereal was eaten and the clean underwear on–and before a single other box was unpacked–my mom would load her three still-sleepy and somewhat grumpy little girls into the station (the official car of my childhood) and drive us down to the nearest Kmart.  We made a bee-line to the garden department, where my mom would pull a few dollars from her purse and count up all of her loose change to purchase a couple pony-packs of little purple pansies.

We were not a family of means.  At least not the temporal kind.  There was always love abounding in our home, and the fruits of imagination were never in want.  But money quite often was.  The frequent moves from one state to another were–more often than not–compelled by searches for employment, and while, by the grace of God and the yield of our garden, we never went without food, there was rarely money left for non-essentials and little luxuries.

But my industrious and ingenious mother somehow always found a way to come up with the $2.86 that would see us, in our post-Move-In-Day ritual, driving back to our new house with a dozen tiny pansy plantings in our possession.  The rest of the morning was consumed with digging, planting, and watering until our precious little pansies were safe in the warm, sifted dirt.  If there was no flower-bed, we would make one.  I remember my 5-year-old wonder and being quite impressed with not only the ingenuity but the moxy of my mother as she “cut”  (with a kitchen knife!) a flower bed into the grass that ran all the way up to the outer walls of one house, and then showed my and my flabbergasted sisters how to roll back the sod. Only once all the treasured pansies had been lovingly transferred from the plastic carriers to the waiting dirt did we wash our hands and return to the business of unpacking boxes, finding needful things, and setting up house.  The flowers always came first. That’s just the way it was.

About the time I was 6 or so, it was time for another move.  By now I was old enough (and asked enough questions) to understand the difference between “owning” a home and “renting” a house, and I knew that this new place where we would be living was not really ours.  The Move-In Day ritual proceeded as usual, followed the next morning by the traditional trip to a new Kmart for our pansies.  About the time we were rolling back the grass to make a new flower-bed, I abruptly stopped looking for worms in the newly-exposed dirt as something quite ridiculous occurred to me about what we were doing.

“This house isn’t really ours, right?” I asked my mom.

“That’s right. We are renting this house.” she replied.

“Are we going to rent it forever?”

“No, not forever.  We want to buy our own house again someday, so I’m not really sure how long we will be here.”

An illogic absurdity was quickly forming in my little kindergarten mind.  My inner-vulcan (my father and I were huge Trekkies, and because I fancied pointy ears, I always identified with Spock) was drawing a conclusion that made our move-in practice of populating the empty dirt with as pansies  seem nothing short of preposterous.

“This is not our house, so this is not our dirt.  And we don’t even know how long we will be here.  Why in the world  are we planting flowers when we can’t take them with us and we have no idea how long we will get to enjoy them?”  I was almost indignant.

And then my sweet, beautiful mother set down the kitchen spoon she was using for a trowel, pulled me over close to her, and taught me one of the most important lessons of my entire life.

“It doesn’t matter where you are, or how long you will be there,”  she said, stroking my long, tangled blond hair. “You should always make every place you go more beautiful than it was when you found it.”

“But when we leave and move to the next place, the next people to live here will get to enjoy OUR pansies!” I was not only indignant now, but feeling slightly cheated as well.

“Then how lucky for us, that we get to do something beautiful for people that we haven’t even met.”

“But….” My injured sense of justice was beginning to crumble at the sound of deep conviction in my mother’s soft voice.

“Tara, always, always, always leave every place you go more beautiful than you found it.  Whether you are going to be there a day, a month, a year, or a lifetime…it doesn’t matter.  It’s the making it beautiful that really matters.”

And because she was my mother, and I trusted her, I believed her.  And that was that.  I returned to sifting through the newly exposed soil for earth-worms (“free pets” as I called them) and in a couple of hours we had our little flower bed of purple pansies.

I wasn’t outwardly aware of it, but something profound had changed inside my young tender heart.  We were planting pansies in the ground, but with her simple statement about beauty my mother planted inside my soul the seeds of a belief that would shape, guide, and bless my entire life.

“It doesn’t matter where you are, or how long you will be there..you should always make every place you go more beautiful than it was when you found it.”

Over the years as I grew older and more observant, I began to see that my mother’s philosophy about pansies wasn’t really about flowers.  The pansies were only one example of an ideology that governed the way she did everything in her life, and that left a wake of beauty behind her where-ever she went.  And they took on echoes of a metaphor that represented the myriad of beautiful and inspiring qualities that color her gorgeous, resilient soul.  I have watched her, first as a little wonder-filled girl, then as an impetuous and awnry teenager, and now as a grown woman, create real beauty in the most surprising of ways and in the most impossible of places.  I have stood by and watched in silent awe as time and again she would choose to make the best of harrowing situations that would have filled other women with bitterness and anger. I have seen her endure years of struggle and frustration without ever once uttering one word of complaint.  I have witnessed her return love for insensitivity, kindness for cruelty, and offer forgiveness when I was certain it wasn’t deserved.

We never had money growing up, but we always had a clean, beautiful place to live because my mother would somehow find a way to transform a hovel into a homestead.  Like planting pansies in borrowed dirt. She learned to oil paint and tole paint, and filled the walls of our homes with beautiful pictures and charming decorations.  I don’t ever remember her going shopping to buy clothes for herself, but if there was ever anything left over in the bank account then she would take us to the sewing store to pick out our favorite fabrics  that she would magically turn into the most beautiful dresses.  Our food was never fancy, but my mom went to great effort to make sure that it was healthy, and that we had the proper nutrients to learn, grow, and think. And while I am sure she had dreams of her own that extended beyond the walls of our house and the job description of ‘Home-maker’, never for one moment did I ever feel like this remarkable women would rather be doing anything else in the world than be our mother and take such wonderful care of us.

I watched her serve others not because she was expected to, but because she wanted to.  Making dinner for neighbors who were sick or had just had a baby or were having a hard time was just a regular part of our life.  Only know do I understand the great gift of love  and sacrifice it was, as we hardly had enough money for food for our own family.  But my mother never mentioned this…she just found a way to make it all go a little further.  Every person who came into our home was welcomed and accepted, and every person who left our home felt a little bit better about themselves because of her great and unconditional love.  And when I stumbled through the hard places of my life, that beautiful, unconditional love was always waiting to wipe away the tears, patch up the scrapes and the bruises, and just hold me while I waited for things to get better and for my heart to heal.

My mother taught me through the way she lived that true class and graciousness have nothing to do with income or social strata. It is the decision to be 100% responsible for the beauty that exists in your own world.  And in your heart. “Pretty is as pretty does,” she would often say, and now as I teach women about the importance of discovering and living from their own True Beauty, her words have even deeper meaning for me.

“It doesn’t matter where you are, or how long you will be there..you should always make every place you go more beautiful than it was when you found it.”

Mahatma Gandhi said, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”  Sometimes that means sometime as simple and sublime as planting a dozen pansies in borrowed dirt.  The way we do anything is the way we do everything, and wether it’s putting flowers in the someone else’s ground or love in someone else’s heart,  I learned that day, digging by my mother’s side, a lesson that I would come to teach as my #1 Beauty Secret: “True beauty has nothing to do with the way you look, but everything to do with the way you live.”

So as much as I am captivated by the dramatic beauty of roses, pansies will always be the flower that makes my soul smile.  And no matter how many times I may move or where I may live, before the first boxes are unpacked you can guess where I’ll be.  You will undoubtedly find me in the flower bed, with pansies in my hand and tears in my eyes as I plant my mother’s beautiful legacy in the ground…and deep in my grateful, flower-filled heart.

It’s time to strip away everything, get real, and get raw with this month’s NAKED TRUTH ABOUT BEAUTY segment!

The TAKING BACK BEAUTY Movement

I recently finished filming a WWII movie, where we told the story of some very brave men and women who gave everything they had to overthrow tyranny and win back their freedom and liberty.  We all know how that story ends, and that the Allied Forces eventually won the war.  Today I want you to join forces with me in inciting a revolution of an entirely different sort–one that will overthrow an oppression that has created untold casualties in the hearts and minds of women all over the world.  I want you to join with me in the movement to TAKE BACK BEAUTY.

In this movement, we will DEBUNK THE BEAUTY MYTH, the lies about our true beauty and worth that we have been told our entire lives by the media and society at large.  Like a silent, deadly poison, the

BEAUTY MYTH had crept unhindered into the deepest corners of our beliefs, and has taught us that unless we look like the impossibly “perfect” images created by the media and marketing moguls,  we are NOT beautiful, we are NOT worthy, we are somehow defective, and we will NEVER be enough.

But there is another way.

Before every great revolution comes the moment of DECISION, when people are no longer willing to tolerate the painful cost of living under a heavy curtain of lies. That moment has come for the women of the world. It is time for us to DECIDE to DEBUNK THE BEAUTY MYTH, TAKE BACK OUR BEAUTY, and live as the STAR OF OUR OWN LIVES.

In 1848 a small but inspired group of women decided that it was no longer tolerable that they should not enjoy the same rights of citizenship as men–namely, the right to vote.  It took almost 100 years, but after decades of perseverance, sacrifice, and dedication to their cause, on Election Day 1920, the women of the United States of America were permitted, for the first time, to cast their vote and make their voice heard.

But just as a single light bulb can eradicate the darkness from an entire room, and just as a small but impassioned group of people dedicated to an inspired cause can change the course of history forever, we can band together to TAKE BACK BEAUTY.  We can redefine the way society views beauty.  We can change the way we as women see our own reflections.  And we can demand that the companies who are in large part responsible for perpetuating the beauty myth simply change the way they market their products to the very women who keep them in business.

The Dalai Lama said, ‘The Western Woman will save the world,” and I believe that will happen in the very moment She chooses to save herself from the broken beliefs that have held captive her true greatness and power. When a women is deeply connected to her birthright of beauty, everything in her world evolves. Beautiful beliefs inspire beautiful actions. Beautiful actions create beautiful habits.  And beautiful habits give rise to a beautiful world.

So imagine that world with me for a moment. Imagine a world where every woman knows her worth, and every decision she makes in her life is based on a sense of honor, love, and respect for herself. Imagine a world where women, instead of competing against one another, are naturally inclined to join ranks in created in world of greater prosperity, safety, and peace for everyone .  And imagine a world where our little girls grow up knowing that they are beautiful and perfect and precious just as they are, and that anything they can imagine is theirs to create.  Overnight the face of the planet will change.  The lightbulb of truth will be switched on. We will find once again the precious things we had lost to the darkness, and we will walk with safety and ease along the great path of destiny laid out before us.

A call has sounded across the landscape of our collective hearts.  You have probably heard it echoing in your own.  It is enlisting us to a cause that will catalyze global change.  One invention made darkness forever irrelevant.  One decision made women’s rights in an entire country irrefutable.  And we will light up the entire world as we make our voices heard.

To join the TAKING BACK BEAUTY movement, do these three simple things.

1) SIGN UP

2) SPEAK UP

3) LINK UP

“Election Day” is coming, and the time is close at hand when we will cast our vote, and make our voices heard. While I cannot yet reveal all the exciting details of just what that will entail, what I can tell you is this: The force of our collective hearts and the sound of our collective voices raised together in the call to TAKE BACK BEAUTY cannot be ignored.

We have the opportunity–no, the responsibility–to create a world where every woman feels beautiful, and is empowered to create a beautiful life. Join with us as we stand together united to TAKE BACK BEAUTY, and create the beautiful world we all want to live in.

SIGN UP. SPEAK OUT. LINK UP.

Be Beautiful!

Tara