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.
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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