More and more i see how the world really needs us, needs people who are willing to find the courage to turn up

Not just show up and mill about on the sides of the dance hall trying to look cool and disinterested but come ready, with their dance shoes on and their requests for the dj and their packed lunch with them so they can nourish themselves on the long haul.

It requires couraging - my friend Marian was talking about that with me this morning - the practice of showing courage, over and over having the courage to see part of your work in the world to be brave.  Building the muscle of courage by using it just like you have a personal trainer saying "yes take that risk with your art/or your parenting/or your relationship, and give me two more, dig it in work it!!!" 

Even if what you do today which feels brave seems tiny compared to what someone else is doing.  Compared with what you might do in 6 months (or what you did years ago when you were in a different phase).

Turning up with courage in your heart will mean that you will be one of those who breaks a part of the mold.  Who tries something new.  Makes a paradigm shift.  Steers the boat on a slightly different course.

Makes a difference.

Part of what i have learned is that new and shift and different are like acid to some people.   They burn and hurt.  

It is hard for kind and empathetic people to see this and not to feel the hurt and the burn too.  But is it cause to stop?  No.

The way humans have done things on the planet in the overculture (beautiful word used by Dr Estes to describe the dominant cultural norms... it has such a looming sense of the ominous for me which makes it perfect) are hurting our planet.  There is no way to describe it differently and still tell the truth.  Those that feel hurt by change are often clinging to what they know (even when it is broken, or more especially when it is broken) and any push to change threatens their sense of safety... it can get scary being asked to try something unfamiliar.

When i worked in a horrible institution we came up against this a lot.  I remember I worked really hard to build a sense of change as a gift for people in my job which involved staff training.  I worked up a programme that engaged staff in the sense of possibility, was aimed at taking them out of their routine for 4 days and showing them why change was needed and how good it could be.  I was selling water to dehydrated people in some cases and selling pneumonia to people with bronchitis in others... it was tricky... but I remember one man.  In his early 60's.  He had worked in the institution all his adult life and had learned to treat the people who lived there like they were a nuisance and a thing.  The institution had encouraged this.  But it was time to change.  I really was nervous about having him there and had to draw on all my convictions and values and work pretty damned hard to keep him engaged but at the end of the course he told me that in all his years at work he had never thought of the clients as people.  He had never had the chance to learn.  He had always had staff training meted out as a punishment (make a mistake go to staff training kind of mentality)  He felt like one of the toughest nuts to crack and yet when he got the chance to soak in it gently he could see.  He could entertain the possibility that change might be for a good reason.  And that he might even be able to come along for the ride.  

So like that gentleman, we need to change what is considered right and valid and true.  And the only way we can do that is when we turn up as who we are.  In our truth.  In a "here i am, this is what i have to offer" kind of a way.  

And we get to choose what that will look like.  

Do you want to wear blue pyjamas to do your world changing work.  Well great - you get bonus points for that!  The world needs a sense of fun and play to return to this business of being human.
Do you want to be able to cry when you feel moved to and not be shamed?  Well cry.  Show people your tears.  

When we turn up fully as we are it gives others the people to turn up too.

And the world needs us to turn up in new ways.

What can you do?  How can i support you?  Do we need a community of couragers?

Tell me!!! 
Go!!!

My brother and his wife texted to invite us over for Sunday lunch.  It is nice for our kids to get together and kind of bump our lives up against each other every now and again.




Jokingly Geoff said "Don't forget it's fancy dress"

I replied " I will come as a nearly 49 year old housewife"

Which was funny... until it wasn't.

I am to all intents and purposes a 49 year old housewife.




I write artist on my official forms because it feels good.  But to the outside world that measures who you are by the work you get paid for I am ostensibly a nearly 49 year old housewife.




And that kinda floored me.  I don't feel like a 49 year old housewife.  I am still the woman with dreams of travel and deep knowings that are linked to old wisdom and magic.  I am still the woman who loves to dance like there are no barriers, lie naked in the sun and laugh until breath is hard to find.  I am still full of possibility and wildness.

And I am in this costume of a nearly 49 year old housewife.




It made me wonder as I saw others what costume they might be wearing.  What the exterior hides.  What their true song is under the compromises they have made with the world.




Tell me, what costume are you wearing. 

THANK YOU

For the time you chose to be compassionate instead of mean.
For the time you chose to work on your creative project.
For the time you felt shit scared but spoke your truth
For the time you wore what made you feel good not what was sensible.
For the time you let someone see how hard it was.
For the time you let someone feel shit and loved them just a bit more for it.
For the time you looked at yourself and agreed it was time to try another way,
For the time you did it.
For the time you let go.
For the time you bit your tongue when sneering would have seemed funny but you chose kind instead.
For the time you didn't judge someone for being different from you.
For the time you didn't hammer home your need to be right but honoured yourself and the other instead.
For the time you sang shamelessly.
For the time you smiled lovingly at yourself in the mirror.
For the time you listened to what your body was asking you to do and did it.
For the time you said "It's OK honey, it's going to be OK" to yourself.
For the time you cried your heart out enough that something better could come in.
For the time you stopped and gasped at something because it was so bloody beautiful.
For the time you listened to your intuition.
For the time you said YES with your whole heart.
For the time you said No.  and nothing more.
For the time you said yes when you meant no and then weren't mean to yourself but used it to choose differently next time.
For the time you spent looking at clouds.
For the time you spend softening the tightness.
For the time you giggled like a schoolgirl and all your cares fell away.
For the time you chose love.

Each time you do this and so many more things that may seem tiny to you, you put open the way for the kind of world i want to live in.  The kind of world  I want my girls to grow up in. 
You turn the tide.

THANK YOU.

This is me.  Nearly 49.
I look at this and i see my deep lines at the side of my nose- maybe from lots of smiling, the wrinkles around my eyes, from smiling, squinting into the harsh Northland sun.

I see the wrinkly forehead from my mobile eyebrows and frequent surprised expression in what i find in the world.

I see the mean looking wrinkles between my brows, where the smiling and the surprise and the worry meet.

I see grey hair.  I saw my first one on my head when i was 16.

I see a long face with soft eyes.  

I see someone who looks older than she feels.  I don't feel like my spirit is any older than when i was 18.  Hopefully a little wiser but still full of the same sense of wonder at the world.  The same lust for silliness and kindness and love.

And yet what i am encouraged to do by the world around me is fight against all that marks me as older.

I should buy "anti-aging creme". I should dye my hair.   Like i should be on the offensive against any signs of aging.

I am told by the media I should only consider myself beautiful if i look 10 years younger than my age. Or even better, 20 years.  I should be ashamed of my grey hair and my wrinkles. 

Like i am being conscripted into a war against age.  Invading the territory of an over 40's woman under the flimsiest of pretenses - namely that i don't look like i did when i was 18.

I think this is a form of violence against women.

Older males don't have to bend to the non wrinkled non grey image they presented as young bucks.  They age and become, like a good whiskey, more delicious.

But older women seem to feel immense pressure to conform to the "be seen to be young even if we all know you are not" mentality.  Look at Courtney Cox.  Look at Kim Novak.  

I would like to claim my right to be my age.  As that age looks on me.  I grew up with an ozone layer hole centered over me... the sun here is measurably harsher.  I have more sun damage than many women my age.  But i wouldn't give that childhood up for anything.   

I would like to claim the right for women to look their age.  To wear what they want.  To have who they are be seen - not because they look younger than they are but because they are worthy of being seen.

I claim my status as a conscientious objector in the war against aging women.

My friend on Praying True, Peggy Connolly posted these words.

This helps me to pave a way forwards.  I think rather embracing the concept of beauty in imperfection I just release the Western perception of perfection altogether.  Beauty does not always reside in the flawless.

I think my tool of choice in the war against aging women is to truly embrace my own beauty in my wrinkled greying magnificence.  I can feed this by not eating a diet of women's magazines.  I can feed this by lovingly tending to my health and vitality.  I can feed this by my very aliveness and connection to other things of beauty in nature and to see the transience there, in the cloud, in the tide, in the life death life cycle of plants as part of my map to the beautiful. 

I am going to go all Wabi Sabi on the war against aging women.  I will not hide this - I want my daughters to feel beautiful when they are my age.  I want them to know beauty is more than porcelain skin and pert breasts.  No platitudes about what shines from the inside will do in this surface loving world.

I begin my personal revolution by revolting against my learned response to aging, and teaching myself a new way..




Wanna join me?
What can you love about yourself that counters the war on aging women?

What if everything you did with your body was an act of love,
an offering to the Divine?

What if with every mouthful you ate,
every garment you wore,
every thought you turned towards,

What if each of those choices were an offering to the Divine?

What if each of these simple acts, unnoticed largely by the world, were the things that the Divine saw and felt seen by?

What if instead of rushing through slapping on some moisturizer at the beginning of your day you took the chance to touch yourself soothingly and lovingly, using your touch as an ode to the miracle of skin.  How it holds you together making a barrier to the outside world, microbes working tirelessly on your behalf, your face offering a glimpse of the immensity of you to the world, able to shine a smile into the most tender of hearts.

What if you knew you were only here for another few hours?  How would you thank this body for all that it does for you?

What would change?