How I Treat My Body

How I treat my Body is how I treat the world;

Forgiving of my belly folds, which are the proof of carrying, nurturing, and developing my babies;

Understanding of my upper arms and wrinkled elbows, too much skin from my ancestral DNA; my mother is in my arms;

Empathy for a back that does not flex without feeling pain, representing all the times I have bent my learning in a painful direction, but am still able to stand aligned;

For a right leg that is shorter than the left, which is just asking for time and patience to stretch enough to catch up;

For downward-turned shadows on the face, that because of gravity, cause me to consciously focus on building my smile muscles;

And the right and left arms that for 15 years have gradually and steadily borne the discomfort that comes with the unnatural position required to play the violin;

For the brain that has recovered so many times through pharmaceutical intrusion and accidental neural-pathway forming of dead-end roads;

And the heart that with the center of my chest has held the tension of the realization that back-tracking those roads is a journey fraught with dangerous turns that appear out of nowhere;

For the hands that have typed or written my journey into a record so that I may find my way out;

And the hair that has acclimated to many dye jobs so that there is one thing that allows me to not just accept what is;

For the Body that needs loving kindness, the Body that is all members, and for those cells that are believed  to somehow exist outside;

The way I treat my body is the way I treat the world