Photo: Nick Bondarev

Yet another female friend of “larger body proportions” has inspired me with an authentic social media post about loving the all of herself. This was my reply turned blog post.

When I cut off my blonde curls and went silver and steel, a friend from college that lives half the country away reached out to voluntarily mentor me. She told me so few women really love and embrace themselves. And she added: “I mean *all* of themselves.”

We need women like my friends Paige and Kristen. We need women who show up unabashedly in all their media “imperfection” standards and proclaim: *I love myself!*

...Just think how revolutionary that would be for women, men, children, culture! For far too long women have allowed ourselves to be shamed and feel ashamed because we didn’t meet unrealistic and unfair standards of some fantastical male image of female beauty.

To hell with it.

As these two friends and others increasingly demonstrate, we are the physical embodiment of the spiritual divine.

What we need…What we must embrace is our entire imperfectly perfect selves for the betterment of the whole. When we love ourselves we love others more fully.

I am confident that this is one of the *multitude* of lessons of this pandemic! We’ve been forced to slow down and look at the whole lot of us/our lives.

The way forward. Is love. And it starts from within and reaches outward.

Let me tell you, it was not an easy decision to shear off the hair that I’d pains-takenly grown out long-ish and spent years fighting as I did so, and only recently figured out how to manage post menopause. (It had thinned and frizzed while still being thick. Go figure.) (Bye-bye estrogen.)

It was not an easy decision to simultaneously turn 60, cut off those locks, go silver *and* be online dating. (Well, the later temporarily suspended due to the coronas thingy.) We’re told men like blondes. That men like long hair. And, in my 2.5+ dizzying merrygoround months of online dating at the start of this most odd of oddest years, the feedback was so often on the blonde curls. (And, yes, I often felt like a commodity.)

The problem, I’d uncover in working with one of several fabulous (life) coaches during the pandemic, including a fruitful quarter with Paige Manuel, (a different Paige than cited above,) was that something was off during that period of intense dating. Nice men. Lots of fine dining. Laughter. Interesting stories. A heck of a lot of fun, (which was quickly paired with exhaustion). But no true-true connection with what I sought—intellectual, emotional, spiritual. (Sure, some men met parts of that, but none seemed to understand the whole of me nor reciprocate a combo of these key parts.)

Because I reject victim-blame ideology, I own it: Part of what was off was that I was still frozen in the confines of the patriarchy and seeking approval (that I didn’t need and didn’t consciously know I was seeking) from these men. I wasn’t showing up with the whole of me, the yet-to-be healed from the patriarchy me. (Hello, The Great Teacher, Corona.)

Monday, December 21, on the night of the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the damndest year in memory, Jupiter aligns with Saturn. It’s called a planetary conjunction. The last time it happened was 800 years ago. The 13th century. The time of the crusades. A time of chaos and overthrow. Umm. Sound familiar? (The part about time of chaos and overthrow?) (Pssst: it’s not over. We’re still in it.)

Patriarchy has reined for more than 12,000 frackin’ years. (“How has that worked out for ya?”) (Not so good, eh?) (Me neither!) I and others are convinced that our planet has conspired this pandemic slapdown to get us to examine. ev.ery. aspect of what is not working in our culture. Because. We just. can’t. go. on. like. this. We’re destroying Mother Earth, the very lifeblood upon which we live, breathe, nourish, and depend upon. We are hating and fighting her human inhabitants. And, the dominant/dominating system of male governance just ain’t working.

Stay tuned. This is a complex journey. For me. For you. For us. It does not mean that women will rule the earth. (Although I like that idea.) But the reality is that we need balance. A co-joining of the masculine and the feminine. Within each of us. (My friend, Amanda Dobra Hope has written a book about this.) That’s certainly been a personal pilgrimage that I’ve not fully understood but have been told by my former shaman needed to happen within me. The push-pull, the dominance and submission has not worked. What we must embrace is showing up in the all of us. Each of us. The whole of us as individuals for the whole of us as a collective. There is a feminine rising of power. (Guess which countries have most successfully managed this pandemic? The ones governed by women.) We need the feminine to balance out the whole. Like all of this pandemic, it’s a journey of the individual. And, of the whole.

We’ve got a long way to go. But, I trust we are headed there in the right direction.

Be safe. Be well. Do your work. —xxL