Body Love
How is the soft animal of your body this day? If you drop into your breath, take it down into your belly, what hungers live there?
Recently, I’ve been practicing living by the wisdom of these lines from Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese:” “to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves.” Isn’t that delicious?
My body loves slowness and gentleness. She loves rest and play. She loves to move, especially dancing, yoga and wild wanders. She loves touch. She loves opening the thresholds of her senses and letting the world come in. Hello beauty! Let me sit here and drink you in for a while.
What about you? What does the soft animal of your body love to love?
It’s strange to say that letting my body “love what it loves” is a challenge. But there you have it.
Even such a delicious practice is hard to stay committed to. Especially in a culture bent on productivity and performance.
We are taught to rush, hustle, and hurry. We are expected to override our bodies’ needs and hungers–“mind over matter”–to get the job done. We are taught to rest only when we’ve worked ourselves to the bone.
And as a result, we’ve collectively become so disconnected from the delight and goodness that it is to be a body.
This dynamic is mirrored in the way we treat the body of the earth–as object and resource, rather than as sacred source of life. And as a result, there is great harm and exploitation to the bodies of other earth creatures, both human and more-than-human.
Loving our bodies is a way to love the earth and a way to honor the Creator. We are children of earth. The earth is the literal ground of our being. And we are image-bearers of the Divine. Our bodies are sacred temples filled with the Spirit of all creation.
When we love the clay of our own bodies, we are able to extend that love out to other bodies. We cannot give what we do not have.
So, dear heart, this is a reminder to myself and to you. Let us allow the soft animal of our bodies to love what they love. Not as an act of self-indulgence or narcissism, but rather as a sacred practice of holy participation in this one wild and precious life.
