women's wildly creative leadership emerging from within
I happened upon this, today.
This She that is a tree.
And so much more.
Majestic.
Strong.
Curvy.
Robed in soft moss.
How sensual are these arms?
How free is She to spread herself among the ways of the sky
while rooted in earth.
To gaze upon Her is
to feast upon
and delight in
Beauty
Grace
and
the Mystery of the Mother.
What you think you’re seeking, is seeking you. You think it’s your Idea, your dream? It’s Life’s… seeking to express and emerge by means of You. For this you have been called. For this you have come to bear witness, full witness to the Glory of The One that is YOU. ~ M Morrissey
And I would add, you have come to bear fruit, ripe fruit borne from The One that is YOU.
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Reverb10 Day 16
Prompt: Friendship. How has a friend changed you or your perspective on the world this year? Was this change gradual, or a sudden burst?
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This year has brought numerous realizations of this bearing witness; bearing witness to Life seeking to express and emerge by way of this Being in a female body. Much of this realization has been through women friends.
One of the most occluded areas of consciousness for me was in this place of love for other women, for love of woman.
There is no need to go through the ‘whys’ of this. Suffice it to say, past wounds of the feminine had grown great crusty scabs around my heart.
In my friendships with women, I’ve felt both joy and a kind of trembling fear at the possibility of dropping my defenses. I’ve been keenly aware of a place in my heart that was both longing for intimacy and fearing the exposure.
This year brought opportunities to trust that this was a place of great learning for me. And, in letting go into the places that held both fear and deep longing, I’ve found such a sweet, yet powerful, love. It’s a kind of love that is only available between women, because it is intrinsic to women. In this connection from woman to woman, I have come to know a part of womanhood that had been disowned.
This love is tender, yet powerful.
This love is a mirror of purity, for women are pure in a way that is very practical: we are created with the body wisdom to bring the sacred into matter, the soul into human life.
This love makes my knees buckle for it tells me of the power that is at the heart of the receptive, nourishing, ripe and earthy female body.
In a passage that makes me swoon every time I read it, Rilke writes:
Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit…
We bear bodily fruit, whether or not we bear children. This fruit requires nourishment from the body and soul. Life lingers in us, because life has created our bodies as vessels of creation. Life dwells here in these hips and thighs and breasts. When I open to this deep relationship with another woman, I feel this ripeness in her and in me.
This ripeness tells of a disowned knowing of what it is to be woman, tales long-forgotten in a masculine culture.
In these times, we are begin asked to remember this body wisdom. We are being asked to heal this place of wounding between woman and woman.
My friends are teaching me beautiful things about womanhood, precious powerful things about what we can awaken, enliven, and bring forth in ourselves to heal the crusty scab-bearing wounds of our times.
It is the blossom that brings forth the fruit. The blossom comes right out of the gray, hard bark of the tree. Somewhere within the tree itself lies the kiss that brings forth the apple. We women are no different. Somewhere within us lies the kiss that will awaken our ripeness, our bounty, our gift.
Can we open to, and receive, Life’s kiss?
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What wounds are you willing to heal?
Where do you feel Life’s Kiss upon you?
How have your friendships with women opened you to this bounty within your own Being?
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Image courtesy of midnightcomm, under CC2.0
“Anytime you think of sexuality, you’ve got to think of your whole life.” Cornel West
Reverb10 Day 06
Prompt: Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?
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Love.
This year has been about making love. And, I’ve used my heart, my body, my mind and my soul
Now I know most of us have been taught that making love means having sex with someone we love. But, I want to break open the tiny sliver of a way in which we see sexuality, sensuality, the erotic.
The way we currently see sexuality is limiting, yet it is so much more. Collapsed and hidden within our culture’s definition of sexuality are sensuality, longing and desire, passion and beauty, and touching to deeply connect.
Let’s take women’s sexuality today – so many women see pole dancing as a way to find their sexy selves. Connecting with our fire in this way isn’t a bad thing at all. It has helped so many women tap into a part of their nature and give it breath. And, yes, it is just one way. And, it can be limiting. It is also a way that can fit into this culture’s view of women – as sexual creatures, even objects, that are here to serve men’s erotic fantasies. The pornography industry is big business. It has a particular view of women, and it isn’t a pretty one. This industry has become ubiquitous in our culture. Its perspective has infiltrated mass media.
When we see ourselves through this perspective, is it serving our wholeness, is it serving how we see and value ourselves? This doesn’t mean trying to eliminate this view, but rather opening up to our whole lives, a sense of wholeness as souls here to love life, to serve with our whole being
I want to open up our view of our sexual energy so we see what’s been hidden. There is a fire in the erotic, a fire that can serve our work in the world.
What if our sexuality could be informed by our intentions, not our conditioning?
I see the possibility for a profound shift for humans: to open our point of view around love-making from an act in the bedroom to all of our acts in the world. To know ourselves as erotic beings in a way that is whole, loving to self, and in tune with the whole of life.
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A story that captures the essence of what I’m wanting to convey:
This man in India is a man of the Brahman class. As a Brahman, he is not supposed to touch people who are beneath his caste. What he does is feed the poor, the homeless, the destitute, the old people who have no one. He cooks each day, then delivers the food, even feeding some people by hand, the ones that can’t feed themselves. He also explains how he loves these people. He is shown bathing them, giving them haircuts and shaves, even massaging their feet. His actions show great love. His voice speaks great love. He is showing these people great love in each action. His touch seems to indicate that he is loving them with tenderness, true compassion and caring.
His actions so clearly show what I am trying to convey. His love infuses his actions.
You might ask why I call this making love, and not simply doing good works. You might find it confusing to mix up sexuality, sensuality and the erotic, and doing work in the world with great love.
All of this can be confusing, because trying to communicate with each other through words is limiting at best. Words come with baggage. We collapse distinctions around words, causing them to point to a mixed-up jumble of conditioning, experiences, beliefs and desires.
For me, this opening up of our minds to our own soul nature is crucial if we are to rediscover our whole nature as sensual, sexual, erotic loving beings, and find the fire and passion to unleash our greatness.
I’m wanting to explode open our limited conditioned ideas of sexuality and making love, for buried in them is our fire, our passion, our power. We are so much more than objects that can be sexy, if we do all the ‘right things’.
Here in our culture, many times when we see people touching we immediately think in terms of sex and sexual attraction. We make up stories about touch. Yet, touch is one of our most amazing senses, and one of the most amazing gifts we can give another. To touch and feel in the heart at the same time, brings a closeness unique to the sense of touch.
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Somewhere, eros and sex got mixed up.
Somewhere, love was thrown into the mix, making things downright messy.
From Wikipedia:
Éros (á¼”Ïως érÅs[2]) is passionate love, with sensual desire and longing. The Modern Greek word “erotas” means “intimate love;” however, eros does not have to be sexual in nature. Eros can be interpreted as a love for someone whom you love more than the philia, love of friendship. It can also apply to dating relationships as well as marriage. Plato refined his own definition: Although eros is initially felt for a person, with contemplation it becomes an appreciation of the beauty within that person, or even becomes appreciation of beauty itself. Plato does not talk of physical attraction as a necessary part of love, hence the use of the word platonic to mean, “without physical attraction.” Plato also said eros helps the soul recall knowledge of beauty, and contributes to an understanding of spiritual truth. Lovers and philosophers are all inspired to seek truth by eros.
eros helps the soul recall knowledge of beauty, and contributes to an understanding of spiritual truth…Lovers and philosophers are all inspired to seek truth by eros.
Audre Lorde wrote this of the erotic:
This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
She adds this:
When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. …
But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an exclusively european-american male tradition. I know it was not available to me when I was trying to adapt my consciousness to this mode of living and sensation.
We can choose to see what perspective we are operating under. The European-American male tradition has choked the life out of women’s eroticism, out of our sense of our erotic, sensual selves. It’s put it all into narrow confines and wrapped the words sexuality and sex around them. Everything points there, and yet in reality, that simply isn’t so.
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A soul that can give of itself to the whole of life.
2010 has been about discovering for myself, what it is to be a sensual, erotic being. In making love to life, I am beginning to re-member the sensual and erotic nature within my being that I cut out because it didn’t fit into the cultural tradition in which I was raised. I began to earnestly make love to life, to let go of the small narrow ways I see myself, so I can open to the erotic nature of the soul and of life itself.
What is it to be a soul in a human, female body, a soul that longs to remember its wholeness, the beauty of the world in which it lives? A soul that can give of itself to the whole of life?
Bringing our whole selves to our work, to helping give birth to this new paradigm means re-discovering our nature, a nature that can bring the joy, the eros, the love back into a world starving for what we have to give. We can unleash a passion that fuels our work, so we give our whole selves to it, not just our small, timid egos.
I am in the midst of this making, a making of how I live in this world, how I see myself and what I can truly do, so that it isn’t quite so overwhelming, but rather a natural extension of my nature.
Let’s allow ourselves to notice the fire that was hidden, the passion and joy for life that have been tucked away in the bedroom, or that have become non-existent in our lives, because we believe they can only come out when we’re having sex, or feeling sexy.
Let’s allow each other to discover this for ourselves, to not judge how we do so, but to know we’re all on this journey together, in service to the emergence of the sacred feminine within us.
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“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.†~ Pablo Neruda
Oh, Neruda; he managed to put into words things, sensations and experiences that seem so hard to describe in words, but feel so powerfully alive.
I don’t know what this gorgeous line from this master of poetry brings to mind for you, but for me, when I first read it I instantly thought of the way we humans try so hard to not be our fully fragrant selves.
And yet, even when we deny our erotic nature, the ebb and flow of the rhythms of life that flow through the marrow of our bones and the blood in our veins, this erotic nature, this life bubbling with life, still pulses within us.
We can try to get rid of the ‘evidence’ of our earthly beauty, our ripeness, our sensuality.
We can try to hide those parts of ourselves that we believe are too much, too generous, too bright and loud, too earthy and gritty, in short, too beautiful to present to the world…but Neruda knows and reminds us that spring will always come, again.
And spring has its way. It comes out of the dead of winter, when much has died away.
Now as we go deeper into the dark months, deeper into fall, then winter, it’s a good time to open to those parts we’ve hidden away, feed them, warm them by the fire, nourish and nurture them, so when spring comes, spring can do what it does.
Spring just does what it does, and sometimes, like Spring, we do what we do, when we don’t talk ourselves out of our earthy, juicy, blossoming selves. We remember what we long to do, we remember that we long for life to do to us, “what spring does with the cherry trees.â€
image courtesy of Crunchy Footprints on Flickr, under CC 2.0
I want to do to you what Spring does with cherry trees. ~ Neruda
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I’ve been contemplating Neruda for days now. Discovering this one simple quote, above, led me to this poem of his. And I melted. Oh, my, what this poem exudes.
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I posted a few lines:
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
on Facebook and Twitter, and what came back was rapturous delight from women. Gasps. Oohs. Aahs.
I didn’t receive pithy statements about the beauty of the lines, but rather short exclamations of feeling.
Feeling. Something wakes up in us when we experience these words.
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Life is erotic. Life re-creates itself, over and over. Life is an impulse, a continual impulse to come into existence. Life is birthing itself in every moment.
“What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth.” Meister Eckhart
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Most of the lessons we’ve internalized about ‘what Spring does to cherry trees’ isn’t about life or God or ooh and ahh. Think of a nice big fat cherry pie. What we’ve been taught to believe is like taking that cherry pie and cutting the tiniest sliver out of it, then serving it up as the whole pie. The slice is so small, it can’t even stand on its own. And it doesn’t even taste like cherry pie anymore.
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Pleasure, Eros, Sensuality, Sexuality. These themes are woven into Neruda’s works, but he speaks of life, of earth, of people, of longing, of creation, of love.
And in these lines, he wraps the oh-so-humble elements of this human earthly existence in robes of divinity:
Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
We are sensual beings. We live in one big erotic field. Life is pulsing through our veins. Life throbs. Life longs.
In spring, we are in the outward, pulsating part of the cycle of life. Just as in the cherry tree, we feel this pulsing, this desire, this longing to create.
It’s actually really practical, too. When your creations and actions flow from this inner impulse, they come from the intelligence that is life. They are vibrantly alive and captivatingly juicy.
This impulse is a guide to truth and integrity. It is a guide to aliveness and to joy. It is a guide to feeling all of what life offers, even those feelings we’ve pushed away for so long. It is a guide to pleasure and the land of the unknown.
I could feel this in the women who responded with alive oohs and aahs. Our power lies in our bodies, in waking up to and living in the divinity that breathes fire into each and every female cell.
Do I dare live, love and create from this place? Do you? Do we?
After our last post, It Just Popped Out, I’ve been basking, and reveling, in the sensuous. The sensuousness of Life. As I open to receive it, I see it is always here, whether or not I am aware of it. Yes, right now is a beautiful time of year. And, life is always serving up beauty, even if it isn’t the kind of beauty our minds desire.
As I was attempting to put into words what I could see out my window, I thought, “Why bother?! I’ll just video it.
So here is my first vlog. As you will see, I’m not on it. It’s too early in the morning. Besides, what I want to capture is what is out there in the early morning sunlight.
I hope you enjoy this. I’d love to hear what it inspires in you.
I’m currently updating this video. It will be online again soon.
The body is like an earth. It is a land unto itself. It is as vulnerable to overbuilding, being carved into parcels, cut off, overmined, and shorn of its power as any landscape. The wilder woman will not be easily swayed by redevelopment schemes. For her, the questions are not how to form but how to feel. The breast in all its shapes has the function of feeling and feeding. Does it feed? Does it feel? It is a good breast. ~Clarissa Pinkola Estés
I picked up my old and tattered copy of Women Who Run With The Wolves again, just the other night. This book carried me through a tough time in my life, a time when I was hurting from a break-up that took me by surprise. In my healing process, I decided I needed to learn how to stay by my own side, no matter what, no matter how shiny the object of my desire was over there. That need to hop the fence can be so seductive. Reading Estés’ classic, I took my own hand in mine and walked deeper into the wild forest of me. Her words spoke to my soul in a way no other author has…except, perhaps, Marian Woodman.
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So I picked up Estés’ book again, let it fall open, and it opened to the quote above.
The body like earth. A land unto itself. Vulnerable. Overbuilt, overmined, cut off, carved into parcels. Shorn of its power. Wild women. Breasts. Feeling and feeding.
Ahhhhh. Back in the land of the wild.
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My mind went back thirty years to motherhood, to the times when I nursed my two babies. Such wondrous moments those were. I loved being a mother to babies. I loved nursing. I can still remember the feeling of the milk letting down when my babies cried. The connection between cry and breast, hunger and milk. All on its own, my body responded to my little ones’ cries for nourishment. The wisdom of the body, especially the female body that can bring life into life, can hold it while it grows, and can then birth it into being, is a mystery. It is sacred.
But even if we never feed our children from our breasts, or never have children, they are still wonderful parts with which to feel. Yes, our lovers can enjoy them; but we get to feel life through our breasts, sensations that let us know we are sensual creatures, that we love what we love.
When we are no longer focused on being the object of desire, but rather the subject, we can enjoy our bodies as the wild woman, the woman that knows her instincts, feelings and body from the inside out.
Desire, pleasure, feeling, aliveness. The body brings us into direct experience with life, back to our senses.
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Estés writes:
There is no ‘supposed to be’ in bodies. The question is not size of shape or years of age, or even having two of everything, for some do not. But the wild issue is, does this body feel, does it have right connection to pleasure, to heart, to soul, to the wild? Does it have happiness, joy? Can it in its own way move, dance, jiggle, sway, thrust? Nothing else matters.
These words go right to my soul.
When we see the body as an object to be manipulated and controlled, we are cut off from our wildness, from our instincts and intuition, from our power as women.
When we know our bodies as sacred flesh and bones, blood and heart, we open to how we can experience life through this body. Each cell can awaken to its divinity when we are willing to begin the descent, from our heads where we’ve been taught to live, back into the body, the only place where aliveness dwells.
It is through right connection to our own pleasure, through honoring the sacred within us, through embracing our design as women, that we find right connection to the wild and step into our power. Yes, others can enjoy our bodies, and their enjoyment will be so much greater, when we first are the subject of our own desire, when we hold ourselves as sacred, for we are the sacred feminine in physical form.
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And, you?
Does your body have happiness? Does it know joy?
How do you experience right connection to pleasure, heart, soul and the wild?
I’d love to know what your experiences have been.
Each day of December, I am being moved to post by Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge:
Today is Day 30 Ad. What advertisement made you think this year?
Advertising makes me wonder where we’re going as a culture. To be honest, I don’t watch much TV. I don’t like to shop. I don’t read magazines. When it comes to advertising, I cringe from what I see. I feel outraged. I feel sad. I feel helpless to stop the objectification that continues to occur.
I’ve heard many young women say that they feel empowered because they now have sexual freedom. They equate power with sex. After all, most advertising encourages them to be the sexiest they can be. Everything seems to be about being sexy. Not just beautiful and thin, but sexy, too.
I see woman as beautiful, amazing, and strong. I am amazed by women. And, it makes me sad to think that women don’t see their own sacredness.
What is it to be a powerful woman? Is power only about sex? Maybe in our current cultural milieu it’s the brass ring, but what if true power for women was not about what we give away in order to be wanted, but what we honor and respect within ourselves?
Our sexuality is a powerful force. And, it is a sacred and mysterious force. We are bearers of life. We bring life into life. We are sacredly creative.
I’d love to know what you think about this. What will it take to respect and honor this within ourselves, even in the face of more and more negative advertising?
image by BlackButterfly, Flickr
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As I open to the grandeur of the soul, I feel the immensity of her being. Such raw creative power. Such soft joy. Such simple elegance. Such beauty – beauty unlike anything I’ve been conditioned to recognize or understand. In many ways, she is elusive; yet, she is right here, always.
I refer to her as she, yet she is she not in the way we think of she. She is she in her complete receptivity and vulnerability. She yearns to know, again, the sweet piercing of the heart. She is of the feminine nature.
In my day-to-day life, I know she is there, yet I lose this immediate connection to her. I lose it through the conditioned way I live daily life, that way that pushes out from the mind, rather than meeting life through the sensuousness of the body. I lose it through the ways I have learned to disrespect myself. I lose it through the ways I was conditioned to dishonor all that is of feminine nature.
Yet, I’ve discovered I can reconnect with the grandeur of the soul by shifting these things in my daily life. As I open to her presence, she leads me to know her through sometimes unexpected means. They are means that speak to only me, for my ways of evading her presence are just as unique as I am, just as soul speaks to you in ways you will know.
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On a warm, sunny day in August, I took a trip in my new car. All my life, I have purchased things on the basis of practicality and cost-effectiveness. By themselves, these are not bad values, but when they rule my decision making process, I find myself surrounded by things that don’t reflect my own internal values of beauty, sensuality, and refinement. I find myself wearing clothes that don’t reflect who I truly am deep inside. I fill my home with functionality rather than refinement.
Things that are well made are beautiful, simply because of the care put into the construction through thoughtful details and quality workmanship. They are infused with a sense of the beautiful.
After twelve years of driving a small car, I bought a beautiful car that had been owned by a woman who took impeccable care of it. In this car, I feel its refinement, the craftsmanship of those who created it, and the elegance of its design. I feel more safe in it, knowing its body can withstand much more than the economy car I traded in.
On this sunny day in August, my very good friend had invited me to travel down to Big Sur, to Esalen. Big Sur is beautiful. The scenery is majestic. And, Esalen is a balm for the soul.
We headed off on our trip after our morning dance in Marin. All along the route, from Sausalito through San Francisco by way of the Golden Gate bridge, down the peninsula along one of the most beautiful freeways in California, out to the ocean and along its shore by way of the coast highway that weaves through Monterey and the Carmel Valley, and on to Big Sur, we talked, listened to gorgeous music and felt the sun shine down on us through the open sun roof. It seemed as though beauty surrounded us and infused us with its power and peace.
We arrived at Esalen in time for a soak in their world-famous baths before eating a dinner that was filled with vegetables grown in the gardens on the lan. Looking out over the Pacific Ocean, fully emerged in the natural hot springs that flow from the ground at 119 degrees and 80 gallons per minute, I began to let go into the simple radiant elegance that is the Soul.
During the remainder of our weekend trip, I was fed, both literally and metaphorically.
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I hope you see that I’m not saying we can only know soul by way of grand experiences. Rather, I am sharing how sometimes soul calls to us to remember its beauty and grace, to remember the regal nature of soul. The tightness and contraction we feel when we deny the beauty of the world in its simplest manifestations, can cause us not to know, on the deepest level, that what we truly are walks in the beauty of all that exists. And, that we are that beauty.
What are the things we learned, at a young age, that keep us from relaxing into our true nature? What keeps us from knowing our deep, raw creative nature as women? What keeps us from reclaiming our sensuality, a sensuality that is not something we have been gifted with just to please others sexually, but rather a natural divine connection through the senses to a life force that all along simply continues to come and go, into and out of existence.
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When I think of this weekend, I think of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty and raw sexuality. Aphrodite is my nature as a woman, of the true nature of all women.
Where in your life do you remember this true nature? What experiences are being offered up on the altar that celebrates you and your femaleness? I would love to know when and how you settle back into the soul, and what that awakens in you.
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This post is part of Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge
Day 19 Car ride. What did you see? How did it smell? Did you eat anything as you drove there? Who were you with?
Place.
As I’ve pondered this word (today’s blog challenge prompt is ‘The best place’), I’ve thought of many places I love:
walking in Tilden Park (I live across the street from this wild heaven)
on the dance floor on Sunday mornings at 8:30 in Sausalito with 149 other sweaty and passionate 5Rhythms’ dancers
sitting on the floor in a puppy pile with my three grandchildren, 2 great-nieces and 1 great-nephew on Thanksgiving
doing yoga in my sister’s (the one and only Molly Fox) incredibly physical, and joyously lyrical yoga class
listening intently to my clients on our coaching calls as they share the most intimate details of their ‘one wild and precious life‘ (prostrations to Mary Oliver)
sitting in meditation with the most amazing teachers Lynn Barron, Amma and Adyashanti
simply being with Jeff, the man I share my life with.
I am struck by these things:
how crazy fortunate I am to be living the life I am living
and
how integral being in my body is to the ability to ‘be’ in any place and ‘know’ how it feels to be there. My body is my doorway to place, because I experience place through my senses. I drink place in with my eyes. I touch place with my heart. I feel place through the cells of my body.
and
The ‘best place’ to ‘be’ in is in this body, this sensuous female body that feels deepy and loves completely.
Now, don’t get me wrong. It hasn’t always been the best place to be. In fact, for many years I wanted nothing to do with this place. I stayed way up in my head, or at times, was nowhere to be found even in the vicinity my body.
Now, after much ‘work’ and lots of great body practices, I know differently. This female body is divine. Not just mine. All female bodies are divine.
I remember being at and Adyashanti retreat when he was speaking about the divine nature of all of life. As I listened, I had an epiphanic experience (fancy way of saying an ephiphany, because I love the word epâ‹…iâ‹…phanâ‹…ic). I suddenly knew, in the embodied way, that my female body, and all female bodies, are divine. We bring life into life in a myriad of forms. Our female bodies are gateways to this amazing thing we call life. If we are in our bodies, we feel deeply, we connect with the earth.
As this was satsang, when the time came for people to share experiences or ask questions, I raised my hand, was called upon, strode up to the mic, and said, loudly and clearly, “I just got that this body (pointing to mine) is divine”. I suddenly heard a chorus of female gasps arise around the room. I obviously wasn’t the only one who had missed this message growing up.
So in wondering about place, I now see, and taste and touch and hear and feel, that body needs to be in conscious relationship with place, any place, to know it.
As Mary Oliver writes,
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
This post is part of Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge
Day 11: The best place. A coffee shop? A pub? A retreat center? A cubicle? A nook? A BODY!
Image credit: Place of Healing, by Mara on Flickr
