"Like the Faultlines that Pave the Palms of Your Hands"

"When your hands go out,
love, toward mine,
what do they bring me flying?
Why did they stop
at my mouth, suddenly,
why do I recognize them
as if then, before,
I had touched them,
as if before they existed
they had passed over
my forehead, my waist?

This first stanza from poet Pablo Neruda's poem "Your Hands" was the starting place for our recent discussion about the meaning of beauty during A.B.L.E.'s Love Supreme program. The questions that students were asked to consider: What makes a person, place or thing "beautiful"? What part of ourselves do we find beautiful?

To help ease any possible tension about discussing the topic, all the participants formed a circle and placed their hands palms up and observed what they saw. They then wrote down what they liked and disliked about their hands. Next, they each traced and cut out an outline of their hands, noting what they liked on their left palm and what they disliked on their right palm. Finally, they worked with a partner and photographed their hands.

The reactions to this exercise revealed much about how adolescents think and feel about concepts of beauty. Listening to their views I was reminded of the lines from Nick Laird's poem "On Beauty:"

They are the damed
and so their sadness is perfect,
delicate as an egg placed in your palm.
Hard, it is decorated with their face.

Like the fault lines that pave the palms of our hands, what the students learned about beauty is that it can take many paths.