You are Miraculous

So am I. So are they.

Two Nude Dancers in a Landscape (1913) by Max Zachmann. Original from The National Gallery of Art. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

I was feeling frustrated with my tired, aching body. I was in bed, early, because I’d run out of spoons (energy) for the day. Again.

I do a short meditation each evening as part of my wind down routine. Tonight, I didn’t even want Andy Puddicombe’s soothing tones talking to me, so I did an unguided meditation. In the silence, I let thoughts arise and depart, observing them with as much curiosity and as little judgement as I could muster.

The pleasure and satisfaction of making something popped into my thoughts. I had just finished knitting a cardigan which I’ve been working on, bit by bit, for a few weeks now. I’m grateful for my hands. I’m grateful they don’t hurt – absence of pain is always a gratitude point. I’m grateful my hands prepared delicious food today, and make warm woolly garments to keep out the chill of winter. I’m grateful they connect with other living creatures around me: they tenderly stroke a cat, clasp my beloved’s hand, and type a newsletter.

Our bodies do so much for and with us. They are self-organising and self-repairing. I don’t have to tell my skin to close the wound and stop the blood leaking out, when I slipped with a knife while cutting segments from a particularly juicy nectarine. I don’t have to tell my immune system to kill any random germs, viruses or fungi that enter through that gap until it heals. I don’t have to tell my stomach to digest that juicy nectarine, just as I didn’t have to ask my tongue and nose to enjoy the flavour of it. I don’t have to tell my body how to extract or make use of the nutrients and energy in that nectarine. I don’t have to tell my body to eliminate the bits it doesn’t have a use for. When I consider this, its ridiculous to tell my body to ‘do more’ or ‘do better’ at all. My body knows far better than I do how to keep me alive. The cascade of hormones that trigger the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response is just one example of this.

The ‘bikini industrial complex’ and social media’s obsession with appearance blinds us to the miraculous of our bodies. Worse, it encourages us to judge bodies – our own and other people’s and then make moral judgements about the natural variation of those bodies. Mostly because moral judgements are good for selling us solutions to things we didn’t even know were a problem. A lot of ‘isms’ arise from this: ableism, lookism, sizeism, colourism, heterosexsm (homophobia) and racism, to name a few. As Sonya Renee Taylor so eloquently writes

no human being should be ashamed of being in a human body

Its not like we can move house, if we don’t like our bodies, so liking or not liking is kind of irrelevant.

When I see someone I love, my eyes and heart experience joy in looking at them. I’m not doing an inventory of how well they fit the Bikini Industrial Complex’s

Template. I’m noticing everything through the lens of appreciating that its them. Their eyes, their hair, their body. Lately I’ve started practicing a similar affection for my own body.

I hope to be here for at least four more decades, with some luck, and I don’t want to hate the container that makes that possible, the container that makes me possible. I want to marvel. I want to feel awe at the miracle of existing, right here, right now, in this body, whatever it looks like.

HT to Sophie Lucido Johnson’s article You Should Flirt More as I’m pretty sure her advice “what if … you shifted your passive, quiet gratitude, into wild, unwieldy, passionate love?” encouraged the thoughts that became this post.

Thank you for reading, your time and attention are a gift.

There’s no Over to You this week, I just want you to appreciate the miracle that you are.