My Most Beautiful Thing - a Love Song to my Body.

Today, I am taking part in the 'My Most Beautiful Thing' blogsplash inspired by Fiona Robyn's just released novel, 'The Most Beautiful Thing'. People all over the world are taking part and creating a shining web of their most treasured things, which is a beautiful thing in itself.

I thought long and hard about what I would write about. Every day I write about a 'small beauty'; those little things that are so easy to miss but that, when we notice, make life endlessly beautiful. Today my small beauty is the fragile new crescent moon but what is 'my most beautiful thing'? There are so many things to choose from and yet again and again I came back to my body. Without my body I wouldn't exist on this precious planet and couldn't experience the beauty all around me.

So...

My most beautiful thing is breath, the lungs that flood my body with beautiful oxygen, from my very first breath to my last. And the space between each breath, that dance with no breath, with the tiny death that happens over and over again every day. The space where I am empty, limitless, part of everything. It is a thoughtless act of faith that breath will come again, that my lungs will rise and fall like the sun. Breath is my most beautiful thing.

My most beautiful thing is my heartbeat, the heart that pumps blood around my body, never stopping its beautiful rhythm of life, the rhythm of the drum and of Mother Earth. And in between those moments of deep silence, of endless solitude before the beat comes again. My heart is as old as time and carries the echoes of every moment that has ever been. My heartbeat is my most beautiful thing.

My most beautiful thing is my voice, a voice filled with breath and with heart; the sound of my singing, not always beautiful, but a symbol to me that I can reach out of myself, beyond my own edges, and break all my boundaries. Today, in Woolwich Town Centre, amongst the buses and the hustle and bustle of people, a tiny bird sat in a little bare tree and sang and sang and I heard it above all the noise and stopped to listen. The voice and the song are a gift, an offering to the wild spirit of freedom. I knew why that bird was singing. My voice is my most beautiful thing.

My most beautiful thing is my stomach, the home of my fire, the centre of my hearth, round and soft and comforting. My stomach speaks of woman and of nourishment, of connection to the land and to things that grow. My stomach has her own knowing. She is a teacher of deep mysteries. My stomach is my most beautiful thing.

My most beautiful thing is my womb, my deep dreaming connecting to my Mothers and to all women, a dark, red, pulsing cave of possibility, an invitation. My womb holds the red thread that reaches back to my ancestors before the ice. My womb holds the memory of the reindeer tracks. My womb pulses to the beat of the dragonlines. My womb is my most beautiful thing.

My most beautiful thing is each silver-track scar on my body. The most beautiful is the largest, reaching from my left thigh, all the way up to the top of my leg and around. It has been there since I was six months old when my dislocated hip was repaired. It has grown with me. It has become the scar of a woman, not a child, and I am proud of it. My scar sings of my fight to be born and to live. My scar sings of the beauty to be found in difference and in frailty, the beauty and power of deformity. My scar makes my body mine. My scar is my most beautiful thing.

My most beautiful thing is my body. My body is my landscape, my home, my map of the journey. She senses for me, she feels for me, she holds my pain when I am too afraid to face it, she knows how to dance in the rain and bask in the sun. She knows how to rest. I am not always good to her and yet she forgives me. She knows the beauty in me that I don't see. My body is my most beautiful thing.

A Love Song to My Body

My body is a poem

Of soft, enfolding beauty

A warm, embracing homecoming.

My body sings songs of Mother Earth

Of rich green rolling hills

And deep mysterious valleys.

My body is a wave

Undulating in the distant sea

My body is the full moon pulling at the tides.

My body dances and ripples

Like breeze across sparkling water.

My body moves

Like a snake across the desert,

Like a dancer dreaming of warm caresses.

My body is wild and untamed

Dark undergrowth and tumbling waters.

My body is soft as a dragonfly’s wing

My body sings to the ancient ocean

Of deep sex and tender longings.

My body is pulling, receptive, fertile,

Innocent, angry, wanting, needing,

Healing, expansive, sacred.

My body is Goddess,

I am my body,

My body is me…..

Jacqueline Woodward-Smith (2003)

A poem from the edge places...

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

(Shel Silverstein)

Hunting the 'whatever comes'...

Just yesterday, a friend suggested that I start a blog and the shiny part of me that likes to be seen in the world thought “why not?” So here it is; time to stir the pot and create a magically delicious cup of toadstool tea.

I thought that this would be a good place to pull together the many threads of myself into who-knows-what beautiful pattern, to weave words, to have space to think, feel and share, and I thought that it might encourage me to write. I really loved 'digging the ground'; finding a name (thank you Jan!), looking for colours and images that I liked, trying different ideas. I am good at creating possibilities, finding potential, and yet now that I have prepared a beautiful basket for my words I am really struggling to write them. In fact, I just don't want to. I call myself a writer and yet the last thing that I want to do is actually write! I have spent some time today thinking about why that is (and that, of course, is the gift in all of this). I love to write short pieces on Facebook and have been told that I lay myself bare in a way that few people do. I am not scared of that. I really feel blessed to share my writing anywhere where there is an immediate reaction and interaction and honour the weaving of connection that that can create. And yet, now that I am sitting just with myself and this blank page I am full of fear and resistance.

I know that I trust the process of writing; that, even if I sit here for hours feeling that nothing will come, eventually the part of me that watches will come to hunt words with me and we will make beautiful tracks across this snowy white page. I find the moment when words come exhilarating and affirming and yet something stops me. Perhaps it is the thought of writing more, of showing off, of being too good, or being seen to be a fake. Maybe I can't write at all. Maybe I will be questioned, challenged, torn down. There is something so vulnerable and exposing about writing from a place of the heart that it will always be scary and yet, it isn't really that that stops me. Under any fear there is often a bigger fear to be faced, one that cuts to the heart of who we are, one that we really don't want to see. For me, that fear is sitting with the silence of myself and waiting for the 'whatever comes'. The whatever comes is a frightening creature who can't be controlled and sometimes what does come can be a bit too real.

I found some 'sitting with the silence' writing from last September...

Time, time, time...if only I had more time. I want to tidy my room, to make it the nest that I feel it to be, I want to write, and travel, I want to work as a counsellor, I want to sew the scarlet stitches and, in my own small way, help people to see the beauty that I see in our journey, no matter how painful. The beautiful pain shows me the way. My birth continues to sing through me, to sing of the healing that comes from such a deep connection to the wounded female underworld and to the spaces between life and death and love. There is such beauty to be found.

I am dreaming the future with every moment. I am creating new pathways of being. Somehow, although I am scared and feel that I haven't done enough, a powerful image of the life that I am building and the person that I will be stays in my head, never changing, always shining and calling to me. I will stay true to that.

All of that is still true and, I suppose, is the essence of my toadstool tea, the reason why I write and try to communicate. So, whatever comes, I am going to hunt my prey here, taste the magical tea, and see what happens. It won't be perfect. It won't always be as real as it might be. I hope that it makes me feel really, really uncomfortable. I hope that it always scares me.

First stirrings of the magical pot...

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night." E A Poe