If Ever There Was Light, It Was You

I started off wanting to write a kind of love letter to all of you who have been so candidly and wonderfully sharing yourselves this week in conversations about accepting ourselves, our bodies, and making fun of the funny stuff.  Tonight as I reviewed all of your comments I was flooded with love for you all.  Some of you are old friends I very much miss who are a whole state away from me, and many of you are new friends I've met through writing.  I've really needed to hear from you and you spoke. 

My thoughts have been so much connected with the influence of core beliefs and how much I need to do more work to alter mine.  I was greatly inspired by both Sara and Jade's healthy core beliefs about their size and I have had their words much in my thoughts. I have also been thinking of Pam's caution not to wait for years to work on ourselves.  I had her experience and wisdom circulating my brain while I was mowing the lawn for the last two days* and I felt so lucky to have so many women sharing themselves with me. 

But as I started writing tonight it became clear that the real love letter is to myself.  It's not as though I am really enamored of myself so much that I sit around writing myself sonnets in measured meter, but what I realized is that the love letter I wanted to write to all of you was no different than the letter I ought to be writing to myself.  I also thought it might be nice, for a change, to show you all what my relationship with my intimate self is really like.  It may be deeply personal, but I think you all deserve to share in it. 

In spite of having some very troubling body issues at this point in my life, I really do understand that what is most important about me is that my spirit doesn't ever give up.  My spirit is scrappy, tough, bright, and difficult to kill.  I hope that no matter what my size or age is that people will see and share my irrepressible enthusiasm for life.

So this is for both you and for me:


If ever there was light on earth, it is you.  If ever there was a path through the sharpest tangled thicket, you led the way.  Though I wanted to bitch you out for telling me I could see in the dark when I obviously had no eyes, you were right.  You have always been right, even when you were wrong by every god damned mathematical calculation.  I am logic- you are fly!  I am dry and brittle, you are like the center of the earth; molten lava hot as new love, old as crime.  If ever there was a voice in my head, it has been yours.

When I fell down and melted into the damp pine floor of the dark forest, you would not let me sleep and I hated you.  You would not let me die.  You called and called and called to me through wild violet spiraling; thin line of sunlight like an umbilical cord, you wouldn't walk away.  You wouldn't let the blades dig too deep.  Always had your hand in my every pie and I hated you.  HATED YOU.

If ever there was a fishwife, gutting me from stem to stern, stripping me of scales, of barnacles crusting me in the heart, it is you.  Though I bleed you still come with your cloth.  With your mop.  With your offers of tea, steamy as new skin fresh from a womb, even when I need something closer to ice.  This body always hot and tropical seeking glaciers. 

You know things no human being should have to know.  You try to keep them from me in your whispers and your secret pen telling only invisible paper your everything...thinking yourself alone while I sleep.  But the only thing you underestimate is my ability to truly sleep.  I am awake even when I dream.  So I watch you write.  I watch you spill.  I know I'm not strong enough to know the things you know but they leak into my cells anyway and I carry them with me and play them out only in the safety of solitude.

No matter what chimera I see in the mirror as my body distorts itself into some shapeless monument of brass womanhood with breasts lost behind belly and limbs becoming larger than life, I see the love in you because you see the love in me.  I don't see what you see but I feel what you feel.  You tell me that where you love there is no gravity and a thousand pounds might be ten.  You tell me that where you love -size is just the house of a spirit and until you knock you will never know what gorgeousness you might discover within.  You tell me that where you love the only thing that matters is a spirit as alive to life as the original spark.

When I listen to you, I believe.

When I follow you, I find light.

When I love you, I feel loved.

When I ask you to listen, I am heard.

You are the original spark.

Every fire I light comes from you. 

I am aware, every minute I sit here breathing, that the only reason I am still sitting here breathing is because you pushed me back from the ledge when I was fifteen.  That very real ledge over which a broken crashed car rusted and handcuffed ghosts to its frame.  I felt your hands shoving me backwards to the bench.  Only you and I will ever know what an iron push it took to still my intense agony of spirit long enough to hear the shooshing of the mountain air.  To hear in it all the agony of the universe; the trees speaking, the grasses weeping, the devil ticks waiting, the voles trenching in hunger, the deer- sleek as velveteen in front of a shimmering headlight.

When you breath today I hear the mountain being exhaled and I understand that I can never lie on the floor of the forest again.

Though I can plant sweet wild violets in my own garden to carpet the splinters with hopeful graces. 

If ever there was light on earth, it is you.



*No shit.  TWO FUCKING DAYS OF MOWING.  Good exercise though.