A Love Letter to My Body

I have been promising myself I would write this piece for a couple weeks.  Funny how it just didn't seem that important and never made it to the top of my list.  Even now I am contemplating ditching it and starting to put together the new file cabinet.  No......stay on target.

Get this book.  RIGHT NOW!

I suspect it feels a bit more important because this week's audio book has been The Joyous Body: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.  She is a brilliant Jungian analyst with a deep love of story that I relate to easily.  So many pieces of this touched me deeply as a woman.  And I wish everyone I know could eat her words and make them part of their own inner workings.

I think the thing that spawned it all was a piece of writing I heard recently that was a long apology to a woman's body for the mistreatment of it.  As I heard it, I wanted nothing more but to love up on the writer and help her love her body more - AS IS.  And there's the rub.  What I really wanted in that moment was to love up on my own body - AS IS.  So that is what I shall do.

I talk a lot on here about my brain and my spirit.  Pretty clear how I feel about those parts of myself.  I know it's hard to believe, but I love my body too.  Yes it doesn't look anything like what the world says it should.  I have decided the world is fucked up and wrong about that.  But then the world is fucked up and wrong about lots of stuff these days.  I have big rolling curves like the Kentucky backroads that hold my soul.  I can't even imagine a body where my bones jut out and dig into my lover.  I heard a comedian (No.  Not THAT one) once deliver the best line ever when he said "Even the three little pigs knew you didn't build a house out of sticks if you wanted to spend any time inside it."  A-MEN!

The world around me spends an enormous amount of time trying to sell me on the idea that I am less than, worthless, powerless, unattractive, and meaningless because I am big.  FUCK YOU!  I'm no longer buying it.  I am big because my spirit is too large to be contained in something tiny.  I am big because I am full of ideas that need to be fleshed out.  I am big because I am defiant.  I am big because I am free.  I am curvylicious.  I am soft because my spirit is kind and generous.  My lap is a comfy place for kids to nap and my thighs are a perfect warm pillow for my lover's head.  My breasts are squishy when I hug someone.  My feet are large to hold up this amazing masterpiece of flesh.  The container is the size it needs to be.  I am suited to it and it to me.

I remember a time when you were smaller, fleeter of foot, perkier in every way.  You are no less beautiful now to my eye than you were then.  Every wrinkle is a story I have absorbed.  I have been 'written upon."  That was one of my favorite thoughts of CPE - that our bodies become the canvas upon which our lives are painted.  I mean, who wouldn't want the oversize canvas for that?  Exactly