Celebrities love making appearances and their fans perpetuate this illusion of greatness – but their external persona bears no resemblance to their true essence as unique human beings.

My wife called me a vegetable the other day and I think she is spot on. However, I said that I preferred to be called an onion of the brown variety instead.

Brown Onions are hard shelled to make them strong and robust.  You can peel off a couple of layers and they still show a hard brown skin which hides the pungent onion essence of the soft inner layers.

This is how we all are with our appearances. We have several superficial layers that protect our personas. Most times, we are not taken past these shells. We are just like the many brown onions on the vegetable shelf showing off our shining armour to the world.

Yet the hard brown shell is the stuff that has to be removed to get at the juicy essence of this vegetable. The good stuff is on the inside and the only way to get it is to slice the head and tail off and then cut it in half. As human beings, we love our appearances. Just like the brown onion skin, it is our protector and our emperor’s clothes. We call it our reputation and it becomes our image in this world. It is held together by the intellect in our heads and by our primal urges at our vanity area near our tails. These two ends of our being hold our appearances tight (much like the onion head and tail) and we can never get to lay bare our essences to flavour the world.

In the onion world, many remain in their shell and never get cut and peeled. They either stay in their brown shells until their days on display come to an end and they rot away, or they are put back in the ground to grow back into another onion. Their integrity is preserved but they never get to serve out their intent.

Similarly, in the human world, many of us stay preserved in our shells for our whole life, never getting the opportunity to be cut open. Only some are graced by the knife that slices off the tight hold of the intellect to allow the soul to be laid bare. In our younger days, we got glimpses of the essence when we had the opportunity to fall on love with someone. When love kicks in – the intellect in the head is cut up and dysfunctional – and this allows the inner feelings to come to the surface.

Sadly, many do not progress to the next stage where they can fall in love with life. If this ever happens, life’s essence is laid bare and it is like a romance that never ends. But for this to happen, a brutal stripping of our appearances has to occur – because the soft pungent inside bears no resemblance to the hard sterile face of the outside….