My Strange World and Beauty
Cheryl Quejada Canning, Sydney. 27 July 2026, a 1-minute read.
Excerpt -
This is a small look into my strange world, my roots, and how I understand beauty.
My Strange World and Beauty
When I think about how my mind was shaped, it wasn’t by self‑help books or people teaching “life mastery.” I grew up in a time when people learned by living. You didn’t need someone online telling you how to breathe, how to think, how to be “your best self.” You just lived your life.
Maybe that’s why Jonathan Pageau annoys me. He talks like everything must follow rules — art, beauty, individuality. He says modern art is ugly. He says individualism is repulsive. To me, that sounds narrow. It doesn’t match the world I came from.
My world was shaped by three things:
my parents’ indigenous practices,
Jaime Licauco,
and Dante’s Inferno.
My parents practiced old traditions. Real ones. Rituals that were part of everyday life. I didn’t think much of it then, but now I see how much it formed me. Those rituals were full of symbols and meaning. They taught me that life has layers, that not everything is literal, and that beauty is part of how we understand the world.
When I was young, I read Jaime Licauco. His writing about reincarnation and the unseen world didn’t feel strange to me. It felt familiar. It matched what I grew up seeing at home. Licauco didn’t teach me metaphysics — he simply put into words what I already sensed.
Then I read Dante’s Inferno. I didn’t read it like a school assignment. I read it like a map of human nature. His circles, his symbols, the way he described people — it made sense. It felt like another version of the layered world I already carried inside me.
This is why modern self‑help feels funny to me. I remember in the 1970s, Readers Digest advertised all kinds of “improve your life” courses. Now it’s Instagram and TikTok. Same thing, different platform. People selling advice as if life is a formula. I don’t need that. I lived life. I learned from real experiences, real people, real mistakes.
And this is why Pageau’s views irritate me. He talks about art and symbols like they must follow strict rules. He talks as if beauty only exists in old forms. But beauty doesn’t belong to one era. Beauty doesn’t need permission. Beauty is simple. Beauty is human. Beauty is the only thing we all share.
My creativity comes from the worlds I grew up with — the rituals of my parents, the metaphysics of Licauco, and the imagination of Dante. These things taught me to see meaning in small things, to notice beauty, to think in layers, and to trust my own way of understanding life.
So, when someone tries to box in art or thought, I don’t take it seriously. My world is bigger than that. My roots are deeper than that. My creativity doesn’t come from rules. It comes from memory, culture, symbols, and beauty.
Beauty is the only thing we truly have in common. And beauty is where my creativity begins.
Thank you for stepping into my strange world for a moment.
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