This is Bea who is 95yrs old!(photograph courtesy of Rosanne Olsen from her book "This is Who I Am: Our Beauty, in all shapes and sizes.")
I was looking for photograph to epitomize what I have been going through, growing towards in the last few weeks and I came across an article of this beautiful book and this stunning photograph of this lovely woman. As soon as I saw her I knew it was the one, it says, perfectly, exactly where my new path is going....Aging Gracefully....and I could not have a more exquisite example of trying to explain where my new energy is headed towards. My intentions for this New Moon, for this new path, this new lifestyle is to capture and live, day to day, the same beauty, joy, inner peace, confident fierceness that Miss Bea has....see that look on her face, that bodacious pose, THAT'S how I'm going to live....today, tomorrow and every day until the day it's time for me to leave this body.....
My new journey I have liken to the story of the Goddess Inanna, the Queen of Heaven. The Cliff Notes version is this: her beloved was taken to the Underworld and in order to save him she had to descend into the Underworld. She girded herself with all the trappings of her power and started her journey, however, at each gate (of which the were seven) she was required to give up one of her power objects, each time it was something more dear and when she reached the final gate she passed through completely naked and vulnerable, but it was that power, the power of her true self that helped her complete her quest. She discovered that the greatest power of all was loving yourself, that you have all you need is inside of you.....you don't need all the trappings of the world to get what you want, which is love, because the greatest love of all is being yourself, completely and in return being loved, unconditionally, for who you truly, deeply, nakedly are.....
and that's what this picture of Miss Bea makes me think of, she loves herself and her life and doesn't apologize to ANYONE for it....that's the new corner I am turning in my life now. I have had a certain lifestyle that I have been drawn to my whole life and have been pulled off that path for various reasons (mostly my own reluctance to "go against the flow") and now the pull back to that path is as inevitable, as destiny driven, as the salmon going upstream every year, I cannot NOT do it......
This new lifestyle, this new path entails me letting go of all the many objects of armor I have used throughout my life to shield myself, my trappings of power, as it were......the first to go will be my hair, as in I have made the conscious decision to no longer color my hair. Right now it is shoulder length dark brown mass of curls that needs the roots touched up every two to three weeks. As of today those roots are about 1/2 inch long with 40% sandy brown and 60% silver and as soon as those roots are about 4 inches long I'm going to get ALL my colored ends cut off and get a gorgeous pixie haircut and celebrate being free from societies choke hold that I keep trying to look younger than I am. I am going to wear my new look with the same fierceness and pride that Bea has! I am shedding my first shield, which has been my glorious curly mane for years, I may decided to grow it long again, but I am not going to keep dumping chemicals on my head in the name of public opinion.
I am fully aware that this new turn will be greeted with a lot of gasps and consternation, but the only person who's opinion I am worried about is My Honey's and he and I have talked and he is completely supportive of me doing this. He is completely supportive of the whole new corner I am turning and I am very pleased and grateful, not for his blessing or permission, I would do this anyway, but for the fact that many of these changes will affect him in some way or another and it is nice to know that he has my back and he will help me any way he can to keep me on this path to becoming more comfortable in my own skin....
The next shield to go is my eating lifestyle and my weight, my whole life I have used food as a emotional crutch and now am 140 pounds overweight, now I am not one to get stuck on numbers but I am well aware that I am very much over the weight I need to be healthy and most of it is due to the fact that I am an emotional eater as well as reactive hypoglycemic, (in a nutshell that means any sugar or carb that passes my lips converts straight to body fat, does not pass go, does not get processed as energy) and what do emotional eaters want when they are feeling blue, stressed, unhappy, happy, celebratory or any other excuse to eat!....CARBS & SUGAR......so after about 27 years of eating all the wrong foods and after 5 years of KNOWING it, it's time to grow up and do what's right and so now I am a quasi-Vegetarian/SouthBeach/Mediterranean lifestyle convert.......a HUGE change to my lifestyle, especially since my Honey and I are complete Foodies, however our obsession with great food usually ran towards pub grub, diner food, the perfect cheeseburger and fries or the who has the best doughnuts, so my decision needed to be discussed so that he would understand that my new choices with food would greatly impact how and where we go out to eat from now on and happily, he is fully supportive and that makes life and moving ahead so much easier.......
There are more layers that will be shed, like an onion, they will be exposed, examined and dealt with as they reveal themselves, for now the most important ones are the thick, top layers that must be removed so I can access the inner layers that lie within, shedding each unecessary one until I reach the rich, beautiful, true inner core that is ME......
So Mote it Be.....
Blessed Be.....
