beauty{full}: a starting point

When the Man came home with news of his upcoming deployment, I thought to myself: good, I'll finally get a chance to write my book. I'll have all my evenings and nap times free, and I can get up and write in the early mornings since I won't be motivated to stay in bed with my warm, snuggly husband. I immediately started drafting my outline and putting together notes. It's funny the things you come up with to make a deployment worth looking forward to, however  minimally.

Then we found out I was pregnant. With twins. And I stopped functioning as a human being. Maintaining my blog was about as much as I could handle, and even that was only on the nights I could coax my children to bed on time and then lug my swollen pregnant body to the computer where I would attempt to put together coherent thoughts. I realize that realistically, with twins on the horizon, I may not be able to "sit down and write my book" without causing extreme sacrifice to my family (something I'm not willing to do at the moment) for another couple years. So I thought I would go ahead and share with you some of the material that has been fermenting in my brain and filling up the margins of my journals over the last year or so.

I have been fascinated by the concept of beauty for almost my whole life now. I'll talk more about that later. But for now, I just want to start with the central question that all artists (and really, aren't we all artists in our own way?) must ask: what is beauty? (Of course, the follow up question to this would be, is there a universal standard of beauty--we'll get back to that later too. Probably.)

For now, what is beauty? What does it mean? How do we define it?

According to Merriam-Webster, beauty is:

the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit

Which is completely enlightening for all involved...

For me, beauty is anything that thrills my soul, that imbues in me the desire to create more beauty, or that enables me to worship God more fully. For the next thirty days, this is the definition from which we will be working.

In clarification, we are not talking about traditional physical beauty. That would be a massive Fail for me right now considering the fact that I am currently being considered to replace Pluto as the ninth planet and a U.S. cartographical society is considering charting my varicose veins as a new major mountain range. We will also not be talking about make up or fashion tips in an effort to achieve the physical beauty that might not come naturally to us. Again, this would be a Fail considering just putting on mascara is a major accomplishment for me, and I'm barely fitting into my sister's hand-me-down maternity clothes. Finally, we will not be discussing House Beautiful ideas. I am a DIYer's nightmare, and I'm currently hiring out the housework since mopping and twinancy evidently don't go together. We will, however, hopefully, have a special segment on the twins' nursery at some point.

What, then, will we be talking about? you ask in disbelief. You're just going to have to keep coming back to find out!

PS Yes, I realize that I could've pursued a less cerebral topic like 31 Days of Deployed Twinancy (which would've been pretty much a continuation of what I always talk about) or a more politically relevant topic like 31 Days of the Government Shut Down (but then you would have up and deserted ship because we all know I don't talk politics) or something super spiritual like 31 Days to Stop Yelling at My Kids and Just. Be. Nice. (but we know that would've been a disappointment for everyone involved--and I would've had to give up the series around Day 0.003). So instead, I'm just talking about what I love: beauty. Which means I'm talking about you.
PPS I already hate my button for this, but it's too late to go back. This is what I get for deciding to jump on in a mere 3 hours before the entry deadline (and no technical experience to counteract my procrastination).
PPSS Yes, I realize that there are no blogging post scripts. However, there are now!