The face is a remarkable tapestry of incredible intimacy. Animating each and every countenance is an unspoken story of tremendous love, struggle, and perseverance. When a face is covered, you realize how much there is to miss. Nothing you experience ever leaves you, the face serving as an indelible record of your dreams, despair, hopes, and heartbreak. The eyes alone convey too much. You cannot hold the gaze of another for terribly long before feeling the unmistakable vulnerability of your own life. Likewise, the lips, present as seductive enigmas even before a word is spoken, contain a poised delicacy ripe for language, and even more so for making love with that which is other.
Character comes through in the countenance. Who you are cannot be hidden with any masquerade, no matter how prepared or practiced the covering. Ethos exudes, without any help or hindrance, broken beauty seeping through the pores, winding its way out through the unintended artistry of age and lines laced with the history of your presence. Your face is your autobiography, Oscar Wilde noticed, an aesthetic of your appearance, beyond conventional beauty, and tied to the alchemy of your soul. When you present yourself to others, simply, honestly, and directly, ready for real engagement with another, you open yourself to the promise of a foreign universe, a cosmos containing innumerable gifts. Facing another truly, you remember you are not alone.