Reimagining Beauty – X is for eXpressive

If you are new to this blog, welcome!

For my Blogging from A to Z April Challenge, I am writing about how storytellers, writers, parents, teachers (in other words, just about anyone) can reimagine beauty to be more inclusive. That way, people with disabilities, varying body types and racial backgrounds, etc. (in other words, anyone) can feel and be recognized by the world as the beauties they truly are.

Reimagining Beauty – X is for eXpressive

Okay, I cheated a little with this letter and the notation of the word. I imagine that other A to Z bloggers did too…:)

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Thanks to Mrs. Friefeld, my 6th grade teacher, I endured a lot of spelling tests. The word “expressive” was on none of them.

She did, however, teach me how to spell “wheelbarrow.” She also spoke avidly about writing vividly. With over 56 million hits on my browser for the search term “vivid writing,” the web seems to concur with her.

Vivid language is expressive. Writers use it to evoke images and to beautify writing. Storytellers compose vivid text which they bring to life with expressive performance techniques. So, vivid text and vivid expression combine to make the art of storytelling beautiful.

And what does this have to do with the beauty of people?

Everything.

If expressiveness in written and spoken stories is beautiful, then expressiveness in people is too.

Wonderfully kaleidoscopic, expressive faces can evince every tint, form, and nuance of the human experience. Recognizing love, happiness, joy, warmth, mischief, laughter, sadness – we read expressions as easily as we read books, blogs, movies, and memes. Talk about images in action!

One of my friends is a visual artist with a very quiet personality. Typically pensive and serious, her everyday face is a motionless pond on a hot, summer day. But when she experiences joy or moments of inspiration, her face flickers, then morphs completely into an open flower. Her eyes and mouth widen, the edges of her lips curl upward in a secret-holding smile. It is not only how she looks after she sheds the pond for the flower, but the entire process of the transformation that defines her eye-grabbing beauty.

We are naturally drawn to expressive people. Actors attract us for a reason. Not because they look a certain way, but because they can make us look at them or issues in a certain way. Human transformers, they can be any character in any mood. If they are good at their art, we believe them. That is the kind of beauty I wish our culture more actively promoted about celebrities and actors.

But as writers and storytellers and conversationalists, we can promote that kind of beauty in the words we use to create images. We can include anyone in such depictions of beauty! It is not the precise features on a face that fit a formula. It is not skin color or complexion. That kind of reductionism strip mines beauty. A beautiful face is expressive because all of its parts belong together.

I challenge you to be beautifully expressive about the beauty in the expressive. Describe it vividly so that others can see it. And don’t forget how to spell “wheelbarrow.”

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