Recent Happenings and Part I of My Body Love Journey

Recent Happenings

A lot of time has passed since my last entry.  And a lot has happened, though I’ve been trying to appreciate the quiet and mundane moments between the big events. Instead of writing a rambling prose to describe the happenings of the last four months, I’ll share four images (four photos I took, more specifically) to describe the journey.

June: A poster from a Families Belong Together protest in downtown Dallas. As I’m sure is the case for many, I’ve been sitting in both the anger and despair of the lives at stake and the power of organized people in this political moment we find ourselves in.

July: Chris and I took a trip to San Francisco for two of our close friends’ wedding. We love to hike and camp in the United States’ national parks, so we tacked on a trip to Yosemite. It was nothing short of astounding.

   

   
 August: My family members and I excavated all eight of these lipsticks in my grandmother's purse after she died. She was never without something to "freshen up" when leaving the house. We celebrated her life of love, service, and courage. I plan to do a series of posts about her impact on my life. 

September: Chris and I moved to Arkansas! After lots of discernment, I accepted a job offer as the Program Coordinator for a new Center for Calling & Christian Leadership at my alma mater, Hendrix College. We are hungry for some stability after all the transition we've been through in recent years, but we are excited to be on this adventure in the Natural State.

Part I of My Body Love Journey

My step-grandfather recently said in this moving interview about a piece of art he created the week my grandmother died: “I do art because I have to… because it’s something inside me that has to come out, and expresses something that’s happened to me, or something that’s important to me.” I think there is such wisdom in his reflection. 

The art that we create--whether in on canvas, on a computer, or in and among a community…It often calls us, rather than us driving or controlling it. I’ve been feeling this in myself lately, in my own emergence into a personal journey with loving my body in ways I hadn’t thought possible before—namely through my entrance into the worlds of body positivity, fat acceptance and the Health at Every Size paradigm. After a few months of initial learning and reflection, I can’t keep the story to myself and a few close friends anymore. It has to come out of me, and when things feel like they have to come out of me they usually have to come out through the pages of a journal or clicks on a keyboard. 

Maybe that all sounds a little vague and woo-woo. Fair enough. However, I want to tell this story of my journey into body love and justice not because I think my personal experience is so unique from others’ or because I think I’m so important, but to offer gratitude to the friends and people who pointed me down this road, and because this journey challenges me, opens my heart and liberates me every day. I think those are verbs worth sharing, in the hopes that others might also find gentle transformation through radical self-love and compassion.

About a month ago, I popped my knee out of place and sprained my ankle at a wedding. 

A couple of weeks after the initial incident, my ankle was still quite swollen and I was still hobbling around, unable to put my full weight on my left foot. After some more intentional rest and placing a brace around it, I noticed within a couple of days that I was able to walk normally, and the swelling went down tremendously. I could not help but marvel at it—at my body’s ability to heal and work through injury without much of my awareness. I continue to experience moments when the body’s work and processes, many of which are invisible to us, keep us alive. For me, this practice of marveling has become increasingly linked to a commitment to honor my body: honor the weird, wonderful, and difficult places it has gone, and the ways in which it sustains me every single day.

If I’ve grabbed you thus far, I’d love for you to keep reading. If not, thanks for your time thus far. We live in a society oversaturated with media and information, and adding one more thing to read can take work and time that many of us don’t have. But in case you’re curious, in the next entry, I’ll go into more detail about this journey and my hopes for a world to first reckon with its proclivity to silence and marginalize bodies of most kinds except for an elite few, and to do something meaningful about it.