I have been painting a chair lately.
Here in our echoey new apartment in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, I have been trying to slowly-like-an-exhasuted-snail-slowly find used furniture that either strikes me as particularly quirky, particularly useful or at least particularly inexpensive.
So I have been painting a $5 wooden chair.
And on top of the paint I have been writing my favorite quotes.
On the seat I have painted a picture of a certain coral sand beach that is at this moment further from me than it has ever been before.
Why paint that beach? Because I knew that sometimes I might feel the need to sit on that beach, and since I cannot literally sit on that beach, I can at least figuratively sit on that beach.
And as I was painting this beloved beach onto the seat of this $5 chair, I inevitably got paint on my hands.
I put the lids on my pain bottles and went to the kitchen sink to wash my hands.
Under the cool water and lavender-scented soap, the paint came off easily, peeling out from beneath my finger nails and sloughing off my knuckles.
And I realized just how spectacular and wondrous our skin is.
Our skin keeps our insides from being outsides. It encapsulates everything we are. It renews itself daily, but does so in microscopic bits so that we don't feel the loss. Our skin resists stains, is waterproof and can be easily cleansed of most messes and aromas that would taint other materials. For most of us our skin resists damage and heals itself when it is cut or torn. When we are hot our skin sweats us cool; when we are cold our skin shivers us warm. Our skin endeavors, through its very cells, to protect us from the rays of the sun, the moisture of the rain and the icy pelt of snow.
And it is beautiful. Our skin comes in an array of rich, lovely colors. Our skin adapts to our efforts to adorn it, allowing us to turn it into even more of a work of art than it already is as we pierce or tattoo, henna or self-tan, inject or otherwise alter ourselves into our current identities. And over time, our skin becomes the parchment upon which our life is written, each wrinkle and scar part of the story that is us.
Skin is something we all have. The cells that make up our skin twin with the cells that make up the skin of each person on this earth.
And yet.
It is this same wondrous material--this skin we wear all our lives--that still, STILL inspires hate and mistrust as those ignorant of the power of our skin use it as a weapon.
As the last rubbery bits of paint washed from my hands I marveled how very much alike my skin was to any work of art--the beautiful raw materials at the start slowly, painstakingly transformed into beauty. And just as easily defaced and destroyed.
