My girlfriends and i re-grouped this week around food and open hearts for one another. Each of us urging the other to 'update' about where we are in life. Each urging because no one really wanted to go first, because you know, spilling oneself to your girlfriends could easily turn into a tsunami of revelations, emotions, insecurities, dirty dirty secrets and other unexpected offerings. It felt good to sit with women, women who are intellectually sparked and more importantly welcomed vulnerability. I hold such spaces to high esteem. As an incredibly over open person being vulnerable is all i know how to be, in turn, i see the ugly of those i often truly believe i have connected with. Each time it hurts more than they will ever know. We need to know that there needs to be more spaces for vulnerability and the dirty to walk from our beings, we need spaces free from assumptions. I have learnt that we all judge.
Around the table, each of us women of color, in socially complicated relationships come to terms with one crucial, over sold , undervalued, intra-talked, interlinked topic: SELF LOVE. What the hell does that even really mean? i mean, love of self, love, self, self to love - love to self. What happens when things get done to you/are imposed/are forced on to you like - racism, sexism, violence, violation, rape, religious intolerance, packaged beauty expectations.... How does one reclaim their self love - love self? Please lets not get into rhetoric shrink talk 101. I mean really, how do we grab, fight for, define, call for, demand, scream for, work for, discover, pray for, heal for a love that requires we connect to our source, the divine place, that core that is you/self? No one of us had answers. Or rather we had too many answers because we are smart and we know ourselves and life has taught us a couple of lessons, but i mean, we still wondered what on earth the synthesis of those two words really means. Yes, getting to know or become (re) acquainted to one's source and the work it requires to get there is an approach. Yet, how does one start?
I am thinking about a plethora of things as i write this. I am thinking about 'my source' and how disconnected my heart and mind are, i am thinking about the injustice against women that i see everyday, i am thinking about my own relationships with many of my female relatives, friends colleagues and how distraught, strained, insincere, fractured and disconnected they are. I am thinking about my African woman self, i am thinking about the young girls i see everyday, that i interact with, that in my own funny little way support the best what i know how - to out stretch an arm of support. I am thinking about the relationships i've had this year, each one singularily so brutally soft and fragile. I am thinking about my own fragility and the desire to connect to the 'source'.
Thanks to my girlfriends cooking me dinner this week, I've made a small list of potential ways to reconnect to {my} source so that i may continue to work on truly nourishing the woman i am becoming and the woman i want to become. So perhaps i'll try:
1. writing down my thoughts more often
2. picking up my camera and hiring an okada man to take me around the city
3. lay in bed for long periods of time in silence
4. slow, slow, slow down
5. forgive myself. This means, for me, taking long deep intensional breaths
6. actually doing it with the intension of intensionally being committed to becoming my best self
what would your list look like? do share....
fambul dem, this is how we do...
No comments:
Post a Comment