the forgotten art of honoring the body

from carving to facetune — what happened?

in the pause between reflection and reforming, she meets herself without edits — her body seen in its own rhythm, not for a performance.
to integrate: 3 quiet rebellions for honoring the body

The Mirror Ludwig von Herterich

there was a time when the body was not decoration. it was not currency. it was not an unfinished project awaiting the approval of strangers.

it was a testament — a visible record of a life lived, line by line, mark by mark. you could feel the weather of years in its skin, see the tides of work and rest in its form. the air around it carried the scent of seasons passed: woodsmoke woven into hair, salt from the sea still ghosting the skin, harvest dust settled into the seams of the hands.

you could read a life on a body. the curve of the back told you the kind of work it had endured — the stoop of the scribe bent over inked pages in the dim gold of lamplight, the square shoulders of the stonecutter shaped by the percussion of hammer on chisel, the balance of the fisherman whose muscles had learned the patience of tides and the stubborn tilt of waves. the lines around the eyes spoke of weather and laughter, of faces lifted to the sun in joy or narrowed against bitter wind. a scar was a story without words, an unerasable sentence in the autobiography of the flesh: i was wounded. i endured. i returned.

long before beauty was sold, it was carved. not always in literal truth, but in the truth a culture valued most. some of the earliest carvings of the human body were aspirational or symbolic, not strictly documentary. a greek kouros statue, for example, wasn’t the portrait of a single man — it was an idealized form that embodied youth, vitality, and proportion according to the artistic canon of the time. egyptian figures followed strict stylistic laws rather than the singularity of a real face. even roman busts, though sometimes astonishingly lifelike, could be flattered or softened depending on the subject’s status and the sculptor’s intent.

and yet, the purpose of carving was not the same as the commercial beauty industry we know now. even when those forms weren’t “truth” in the photographic sense, they were tethered to cultural values rather than market trends. the exaggerations served a symbolic or moral narrative — athletic excellence, divine blessing, fertility — not a seasonal sales cycle.

the sculptor’s chisel did not chase an absence; it pursued a presence — the thigh of a runner whose body remembered the olympic sand beneath it, the arm of a rower whose pull had moved armies across seas, the hip of a mother whose pelvis had widened to carry life into the world. no one was chiseling out a thigh gap. no one was tucking a waist to fit an imaginary dress size. these were not “before-and-after” bodies. they were the embodiment of what it meant to live in a body fully used, fully inhabited.

plato wrote of kalos kagathos “beautiful and good” — a unity of outer form and inner virtue. to be beautiful was not to be symmetrical in a sterile, mathematical way; it was to be in visible accord with the life you were meant to live.

to honor the body, in those days, was to feed it as though you expected it to carry you for decades. to work it until you could trust it when hardship came. to rest it without guilt, knowing rest was not indulgence but law.

the stoics spoke of the body as a loan from nature — not to be neglected, and not to be worshipped, but to be maintained with the care you’d give any borrowed instrument whose return date is unknown.

so i watched Bridgerton and my mind spiraled down a history vortex. not the polite, pastel kind of history where everyone wears gloves and flirts across ballrooms — but the kind where you start tracing the seam between image and reality, wondering when exactly we stopped wearing our bodies as they were and started staging them as they should be.

from carving to facetune — what happened?

in the earliest forms, markings, adornments, and modifications — tattoos, scarification, piercings — were cultural signals: rites of passage, identity markers, spiritual protections, or declarations of belonging. they were not meant to be erased or retouched; they were proof of story, proof of self.

as societies expanded and mingled, these once-stable meanings fractured. appearance shifted from telling truths about belonging to functioning as currency — traded for status, marriage prospects, survival in the social order. aristocratic portraiture in europe sealed this change, producing idealized images not to preserve reality but to project aspiration.

industrialization accelerated the transformation. the 19th century gave us: mass-produced beauty products, purchasable by anyone with coins in hand. advertising that could first teach you to see your “flaws,” and then sell you the cure. photography, which claimed to show truth but could still be bent and burnished long before pixels and filters. by the early 20th century, beauty was no longer primarily a cultural expression — it was a consumer product. the late 20th and early 21st centuries brought film, television, and social media, condensing beauty into a hyper-visual, global standard.

now, with facetune, photoshop, and filters, self-presentation is a constant act of editing. the body has become a customizable interface for social approval, updated as fast as trends shift at algorithm speed. the desire to modify isn’t new — but the why is. no longer rooted in ritual, meaning, or myth, it is fueled by the endless demand to curate yourself for an audience without end.

sometimes i wonder what it would be like to step back into a time before the fracture — to walk through a market where the leathered skin of the fisherman was a badge of provision, not a warning of age; to pass a craftsman whose calloused hands were not an imperfection but proof of skill; to live where the body was unfiltered, unapologetic, free of the exhausting awareness of the lens. would we know each other more easily? would we meet our own eyes with less suspicion? would we finally believe that the evidence of our living was meant to be visible?

honoring the body today requires rebellion. it means rejecting the myth that you are unfinished until altered. it means eating because you are alive, not because you’ve earned it. moving because you are built to move, not because you fear what will happen if you stop. resting because you are mortal, not because collapse is your only permission.

it means letting your body keep its own record — the sun lines, the softened edges, the quiet strength that builds when no one is looking — without ever reaching for the eraser.

to honor your body is to side with it against the world that would claim it. it is to say: this is my only home, and it will not be sold. it is to know, without apology, that beauty without honor is not beauty at all — only costume.

---

this space is built on presence, on knowing there are real hearts on the other side. even a single reply or comment keeps this room (and me!) alive and warm. i read every word.

follow up with 3 quiet rebellions for honoring the body.
read more of my letters here.
and read here if you want to feel why i created the stillroom.
x
cibelle