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Belly
I saddened when I read Eve Ensler’s The Good Body, published in 2004, because it is exemplary of women’s self-hatred. Unlike lots of women, I found The Vagina Monologues, the play by Ensler through which she became famous and which was first performed in 1996, disappointing for the same reason–the clearly stated and unremitting repugnance that women feel for their bodies. Read more
- July 28, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Bookshelf, art, and media
- Comments 0
A time defined by honey
I return home from visiting friends and family who I love and who love me. I am sated from conversation and food. Travel has sapped my energy.
For close to 20 years I’ve traveled a lot, for work and pleasure, in the United States and internationally. I travel easily and come home full. Now, for a while, home is the only place to be.
At home it is hotter than 7 suns.
I entertain my cool head.
A tow truck driver verbally displays to me, who sits in the passenger seat of his vehicle, a passion for guns. He mentions his high IQ. Then karma. I say, at the end of our short trip to a tire shop, “It was fun talking with you.”
In a waiting room 2 workers in residences for the old and the infirm talk of low income, comparative shopping for an axle fluid change, and administrators who they like and dislike.
A fat woman with the energy and skin tone of health teases herself about her love of food.
Unwanted immigrants and other citizens wait for rain as the clouds build every afternoon.
I soften like the girl I was, I am, in my mother’s arms.
I am quiet like the sky as the rains get ready to test the strength of rooftops.
Sacred tantric texts reveal what every yogi knows: mind rules the world, mind bends it, mind in its ordinary state is clear, and empty of concoctions, intellectual or fantastical (which can partake of each other). Yogis may read tantric texts. They may be scholars of Buddhism, Taoism, or embodiment. They may theorize and philosophize, they may write books about the history of yoga. None of that matters. Practice does.
People try to hold their world in place, to keep it from changing so that it can stay what it is, which nothing can. The rain does not hold back–a drop over there on the patio, a torrent for miles with bolts of lightning.
I eat Greek yogurt, densely rich like sour cream, a little less tangy, with local honey from a 12-ounce jar. The label reads “Sonoran Desert Honey.” Beneath the words an illustration of saguaros and prickly pears and a tree, ironwood perhaps, conveys the expanse of the land in which I live. I like knowing, from the information to the side of the picture, that Sonoran Desert Honey “is a pure natural blend of mesquite, catclaw, ironwood, saguaro and other springtime honeys.” The reddish gold liquid is the infinitely sexy complement to the thick dairy. The honey is startlingly sweet, even after my eating it days in a row, a most desirable partner for the mildly tart yogurt. (Before buying the Sonoran Desert brand a couple weeks ago, I hadn’t eaten honey for years.)
An attractive man helps me choose a gunpowder green tea, the smokier of 2 choices.
I water the plants until the rain comes.
In New York in March I met a man’s who’s a delight. I don’t think that I’ve called any man but him a delight. Our romantic interlude at his home in April was absolutely satisfying. I feel no desire or need to spend more time with him. I tell my friends about it all. “I feel like I’ve just heard a novel,” one says, and they and I accept the mysterious goings-on of a happy heart.
I’m listening to a clock and birds.
I’m drinking that smoky tea.
I’m living in a time defined by honey.
- July 7, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Men and women, Pleasure
- Comments 1
Maturing sexiness
The word “naughty” trivializes eroticism and sex. A popular synonym for “sexy,” “naughty” is a sly, little smile with an insinuating wink that force sex into a playground that is associated with children. Making love is play, looking and feeling sexy is play, but adults make love and children look pathetic in sexed-up attire. “Pathetic” in that sentence does mean arousing pity. Children are not capable of the richly erotic sexuality that powers a mature and, if chosen by a person, continually maturing sexiness.
“Naughtiness” defined as disobedience deserves mild punishment. Sexy adults may be disobedient in terms of societal norms, but they are not bad girls or bad boys–they are grown-ups feeling good about themselves. A grown-up has grown from her experiences so that she can discern what feels good to her and what does not, what gives her ease and what does not. Not all people over the age of 21 have accomplished that. One of the best things about being a grown-up is that you get to make choices about how you enjoy yourself and with whom.
“Naughtiness” is also a cute kind of indecency. Honestly! What a ridiculous way to perceive or talk about a grown-up man or woman.
- June 3, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 1
Stripes and bows
I saw a short, tight dress in a shop window. Pink and red bows, rather large, floated relatively randomly over a background of black and white vertical stripes. Insistent connotations. The female body as a prison cell for any man tempted by flirtatious femininity. The female body imprisoned underneath that same feminine overlay.
- May 31, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Men and women
- Comments 0
The buddha girls who love change
“The buddha girls who love change.” That phrase charmed me, wowed me, as soon as my friend said it. She’d never said it before.
Buddha. Anyone can be a buddha. Like THE Buddha himself, you devotedly practice yoga and meditation.
Girls. Grown women who like to play, who are playful.
Love. The deepest affection and kindness. Rather than passion, whose fever leads the soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body into turbulence.
Change. Anicca is a Pali word meaning impermanence. Pali was the Buddha’s language, and impermanence defines all of life. Anicca is at the core of meditation practice within Buddhist lineages. Everything changes–that’s an awareness that comes from such practice. An awareness that transcends mental understanding and that a yogi could describe as equanimous. Commonly, people fear change. Fear kills equanimity.
Buddha girls are beautiful. Beauty is their ground and essence. Fear kills beauty.
Buddha girls are beautiful because they align with change.
Bathing suits and friends
I own 2 bikinis, one from my 20s and one from a few years ago that a lover gave me. They both fit.
The bikini from my youth is green with a flower pattern. I remember wearing it on a beach in Italy. The newer bikini is white and I have yet to don it publicly. My lover saw it in a shop, thought it would look good on me and was my size, and purchased it. I was shy trying it on for him and appreciated his loving perception of my body in the bathing suit, which he reminded me fit the same way that my bras and panties did. I felt attractive and comfortable in them, and his sight altered my own.
I’ve been vaguely shopping for a bathing suit, mostly online. As if I’m intuiting a new Mediterranean sojourn. A man I recently met likes to snorkel in the Caribbean, though I think he’s into private accommodations and naked bodies. I swim infrequently, and the bathing suit I’ve worn for that activity over the past 10 years is a black Speedo.
The beauty of human beings 1
People assume that the young are more beautiful than older or old individuals. Is beauty innate to youth? Or is it innate to human beings?
I think that beauty is innate to human beings and that a primary reason why young people often look more attractive than older people is because the younger ones generally haven’t lived long enough for chronic damage to occur. How long has someone been depressed, had migraines, heartburn, stomach aches, hated his parents or her thighs? Illness is systemic, a soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body effect that can influence the health of one or several organs, the circulatory and nervous systems, muscle tone, the color and texture of one’s skin and the aural and emotional tone of his laugh, indeed, everything that goes into the making of a human being. Chronic damage appears, among other places, on the surface of the body, in its appearance.
Taking care of oneself is a full-time occupation for which few people appear to have little time or inclination. Caring for oneself can be a pleasure of gradual and continual self-discovery. Maybe such kindness to oneself does contribute to a person’s beauty as she grows older.
Sexy for ourselves
In the play Coming in Hot (see “The play Coming in Hot,” April 7, 2010), a young woman’s story drew a soft, ironic laugh from me. Her smarts saved her from being raped by another soldier with whom she served, and during formal questioning about the incident, the interrogator states that the young woman wore a black bra under a white T-shirt. He uses the statement as an accusation, the pathetic, ancient, worn-out, yet terrifying charge to the woman accused that her dress or behavior caused an intended or actual criminal act of sex by a man. In other words, the man’s conduct was the woman’s fault. My laughter may seem perverse, but its catalyst was the insane chutzpah of systemic, institutionalized stupidity. I imagined other women laughing too, silently or otherwise. Women’s astute laughter. It can bond us whether we’re sitting next to one another in a theater or thinking similar thoughts from international distances.
A black bra symbolizes sex, so a woman wearing a black bra is a symbol of sex, and a sexy woman can only mean slut because women who show that they’re sexy or who like sex are sluts. The “logic” of that progression completely bypasses any regard for women’s liking to dress as they so desire, which may indeed be conventionally sexy. The transparency of the garment over a black bra adds to the “fact” of deliberate seduction. (Whether women dress for themselves, for men, or for other women is a subject of perennial debate, but it isn’t the subject here. Neither is the subject of women’s actual ability to choose or show how they’ll look sexy–at those times when they feel or want to feel that way–in a culture that readily misapprehends women’s sexuality.)
- April 27, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Men and women, Pleasure
- Comments 7
Hair color 3
Here are a few synonyms for gray that appear in 432.4 of the Roget’s International Thesaurus beside my desk: “dun, drab, dingy, dull, leaden, livid; somber, sober, sad, dreary; cool, cold; iron-gray, steel-gray.” Then we’re given Quaker and pearly grays and some variations of the word silver. And off again to the land of who-wants-that? with “grizzly, grizzled” and 7 words that describe ashes. Near the end of the entry for the adjective gray we find “slate-colored, stone-colored, mouse-gray or mouse-colored.”
The color gray as lack, of liveliness, happiness, and warmth, disagrees with people’s aesthetic wishes and goals for themselves, let alone their hair. Although grizzled derives from the French grisaille, and gris simply means gray, grizzled sounds like greasy and grisly.
Hair color 2
My grandmother Ida’s hair–silver mixed with white, then snowier year by year. A brightness and lightness at the top of her body, at the surface of her being. Her signature style was a French twist, which she always wore. I loved her simplicity. She never colored or permed her hair or chose one of those short styles, that I see in women even of my own generation, that look stiff and extremely untouchable. I loved sitting beside Gram when she pinned up her hair. In those sweetly sensual times she was my beauty teacher. I have yet to learn how to pin up my hair with her swiftness or perfection, but she was teaching me, simply through my observing her and through wherever our light conversation turned, the love of self. And, of course, the beauty of silver, the beauty of white-as-snow.
