joy comes first
Do you remember the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ants?
As a child, I watched this story over and over shuddering at the foolishness of the Grasshopper. My 5-year old self promised to never be like him. I would always be a hard worker. Otherwise, the risk was clear: starvation, exile and death. That wouldn’t be my reality.
As I’ve looked back on this memory I’ve wondered, is this where I first learned the importance of hard work? Is this where I learned to distance myself from my joy?
in this way we find each other
Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh was known for encouraging his students to see “the miracle in the mundane.” He might, for example, hold up an orange and ask those before him what they saw. Yes, it is an orange, but what else?
another lens on healing
To have a body, even one that is failing, means to continually open to delight. Our insistence of joy, even amid the difficult, is an insistence of our completeness. We are not in need of fixing, we are arrived: complex, perhaps grumpy, but unwaveringly in partnership with the full kaleidoscope of our humanity.
decolonization begins in the body
As a brown girl with short curly hair, DDD breasts and a tummy, what’s been reflected by our media, government and culture is that this body is not enough.