reflections

I had the good fortune this past weekend to host two of my most favorite people in the whole world, the lovely Bach and Lady Wellington at Willow Manor. We had a wonderful weekend doing all our favorite things, eating, antiquing, the movies, (stay tuned for a review later this week) and it even happened to be cold enough for woolly socks and an evening by the fire.

When we were out and about on one of our little excursions, we stopped to have a cupcake in a cute bakery shop. They were fresh out of cupcakes, but we happened to be extremely enamored with a certain mirror on the shop wall. Now, I've heard of skinny mirrors in clothing stores, but bakeries? I guess it's not a bad idea. It certainly doesn't discourage the eating of cupcakes.

As all of us know, there are such things as unbiased mirrors and those magical skinny mirrors. As Bach pointed out to us, this mirror happened to be one of the skinny variety. Unfortunately, this mirror was not for sale. If it had been, we would have been fighting amongst ourselves on who would be the lucky owner.

I adore trying on clothes in a shop with skinny mirrors and great lighting in the fitting rooms. Not only do I feel like a goddess, I end up buying more clothes. But, like Elaine Benes, and the skinny mirrors at Barney's, I sometimes get my purchase home and realize it doesn't look quite as fabulous in my regular unbiased mirror, as it did on the magical one at the store.

I like what Maya Angelou has to say about forgiving ourselves. To be able to look into an unbiased mirror, see our own particular glory, and embrace our capabilities. Just think what we could accomplish, if we could see ourselves in that magical reflection, that forgiving light, and always feel like a million.

I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes - it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, "well, if I'd known better I'd have done better", that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, "I'm sorry", and then you say to yourself, "I'm sorry". If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees themselves as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach. -- Maya Angelou