If you glanced at my color-coded schedule this week, you might be dizzied by its patchwork, crossword puzzle-like appearance. Life has given me a massive work week, with teaching here, coaching there, teaching elsewhere, writing, blogging, while my computer is having its own personal experience of the moment, separate from my own. I know exactly what I would tell you—breath, relax, one thing at a time. I am practicing that and relaxing fairly well into the fullness of the week. Yet, I look toward Friday afternoon with a giddy gleefulness.
As I moped around the house, I remembered this little meditation book I found at a tag-sale once, Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, a one-dollar purchase. I never enjoyed them, snobbishly never cozying up to their simplicity. Clearly this week, however, in this pseudo-sketchy-semi-retirement of mine, I recognize myself as a candidate for the topic. I strangely knew exactly where the book was, retrieved it, and opened to its bookmarked page. An old picture fell out. I often use pictures as bookmarks, for no particular reason.
This picture greeted me, me in 1996, uncharacteristically devilish with chicken soup in hand and oh, so painfully young.
I breathe into my own eyes.
I wonder who I thought I was then, this young Aruni.
I know her, yet I don’t; I ponder her moment, what lies behind her, what waits up ahead.
And then I read the perfect quote on the page by Simone de Beauvoir:
One is not born a woman;
One becomes one.
And I realize in a flush of heat that, in these twenty-two (twenty-two!) years, I have become a woman.
How has this happened?
The losses, the heartbreaks, the shifts of behavior that only the flames of time could soften—they grew me the most.
Here are my greatest teachers:
- Outliving my parents, watching them fade and pass as I continue to live my life forward, while theirs are gone from this earth.
I am a woman now—I am.
- Allowing you to be, with so much less compulsive need to change you. Oh, how that freedom has grown me into a new sense of self, totally uninhabitable while I was wildly emmeshed in other people’s experiences.
I am a woman now—I am.
- Striving for approval, proving my worth, pushing for attention—these things lack intensity now, as if some energetic fuel is depleted, missing.
I have so much less to lose now.
I am a woman now—I am.
- Losing the dearest of animal companions, Buzzie the Bird, the three-ounce-cockatiel alpha of my life, and Lucy Doodle, the blond-bombshell-born-to-party-pup, raising them from their babyhood, watching them grow into their feathered and furry splendor, and then witnessing their passing out of life, releasing breath and energy and leaving me alone to myself.
I am a woman now—I am.
I am a grateful woman now, grateful for that book of meditations that I never read, that book of meditations that led me back to 1996 and allowed me to witness my own womanhood. One-dollar, well spent. In 1996.
~~~
May I be healthy.
May I be happy.
May I ride the waves of my life.
May I live in peace, no matter what I’m given.
May you be healthy.
May you be happy.
May you ride the waves of your life.
May you live in peace, no matter what you’re given.
May we be healthy.
May we be happy.
May we ride the waves of our life.
May we live in peace, no matter what we’re given.
~~~
Dearest of Folks, how has your life grown you? What heart-breaks, heart-openings, victories, challenges, what has lifted you into womanhood, into manhood? Please consider and keep me posted. I am aruni@rnetworx.com.
All blessings,
Aruni