I have the most precious, fun-loving, energetic, adorable, smart, caring, sweet, ornery twenty-three-month old niece in the whole world, and yes, I am biased.  No, we're of no blood relation, but when she runs up to me, arms waving in the air, yelling, "Nea Nea, hold you!" blood means nothing. She's won my heart, and I'll forever be her auntie.

This adored niece of mine has taught me quite a lot about life in her short time span thus far. Through her eyes, the world is pure and full of potential. Love is clean and laughter is genuine, just as it should be. She is the epitome of all things lovely. Today, as we endeavored through a two-and-a-half-hour morning marathon process of relatively simple tasks like showering, dressing, and general hygiene, she said three of the most prized words I've ever heard:

“Nea Nea pretty! Nea Nea, so pretty!”

For clarity's sake, I didn't consider her words prized because they stroked my ego or embellished my vanity.  In that moment, I can assure you I fit no widely accepted definition of beauty, if any definition at all. My hair resembled that of Albert Einstein, my breath smelled like something out of a horror story, and I didn't have the first stitch of make-up covering my less than perfect skin...

..but maybe that's the point. Her little twenty-three-month old mind isn't tainted by the North American definition of beauty that fades with a washcloth. She isn't yet stained by a culture that values attraction over attributes. Her perception isn't defined by cheap standards, but she recognizes beautiful things in a raw, unfiltered form that I wish I could comprehend.

She can't articulate that by which she measures beauty, but if she could, I imagine it might be something like this: Beauty is snuggling, playing with rocks, sharing half eaten food, and giving a thousand-and-two kisses. Beauty is the cat licking her paw, the weeds growing along the sidewalk, and a thousand other things that capture her attention and engage her senses. Love isn't a vocabulary lesson to this precious child, but rather an active and growing feeling in her heart that isn't bruised, broken, or jaded.

I think we can all learn something from this oversimplified reality. No, I don't think we have to abandoned cosmetics or start wearing around potato sacks to grasp accurate beauty standards, but I think we ought to examine the what, who, and how of our own adopted, internal specifications of beauty and challenge the voices in our minds that lie. We owe it to ourselves, our friends, our siblings, and our children to expand our definitions beyond that which is temporal. Seek out truth, my friends.

After all, Miss Piggy the Muppet says, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."