what the mirror said

listen,
you a wonder.
you a city
of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.
listen,
somebody need a map
to understand you.
somebody need directions
to move around you.
listen,
woman,
you not a noplace
anonymous
girl;
mister with his hands on you
he got his hands on
some
damn
body!

- Lucille Clifton

We exist in God's mind as total and complete beings. There is nothing Madison Avenue can give us that will make us more beautiful women. We are beautiful because God created us that way. Some of us know of our beauty and express it and celebrate it. But beauty itself is not given to us by anyone; it is a power we have within us from the gate, a radiance inside us. I have known women who were not physically beautiful but who expressed themselves so magnificently that the result was a beautiful woman.

I have known other women who were practically perfect physical specimens but were so unaware of their own light that the effect of their beauty was nil.

What should a woman do with a fractured sense of self? Many of us are good at describing and analyzing our insecurities; what we must do now is invoke the healed self. Within each one of us, in the realm of pure awareness, is the Goddess ...

Without a potent inner life, a spiritual connection, a woman tosses on a storm of hysterical emotions. Like a beautiful vase into which an ocean is poured, shattering the glass because the container cannot accommodate the force or the volume, we are ill prepared for the powerful and dynamic energies that race through our veins.

We remember everything ...

We were present at the beginning of things; and if people would only let us, we would teach the marvelous lesson we learned from that experience. We cannot get to our knowledge because the world is too loud. And we tend to make it louder as we cry out in pain, pretending we are singing. We add to the world's cacophony because we don't know it's our job to turn down the noise and listen to silent symphonies. No one told us that. For thousands of years, they haven't wanted us to know.

But when we break free and see the game for what it is, we will let out a howl, and our silence will be deafening. We will hear the holy choir of angels, our eyes will brighten, and our smiles will burst forth. We will see the angels and know the angels, and do lunch with them, and speak their case. We will be intimate with the stars and ride rainbows to ancient Greece. We will light up like lamps, and the world will never be the same again.
- from A Woman's Worth, by Marianne Williamson

sanctify your relationship

Whether it is clearly visible or not, every relationship has a higher purpose than itself alone, a meaning that goes beyond the conventions of love and romance, and attaches two people into a destiny that has roots in the past and wings for the future.

This purpose is to shape us individuals into the highest and best versions of ourselves, and to change, if only in some tiny way, the essential character of the reality we have entrusted here by being born.

To know that is to believe that whatever occurs between you - the petty dramas and traumas, the life-shaping tragedies - is honing you for your unique participation in the human stream. It is to accept that the person you love has come into your life for a reason that goes beyond the satisfactions of the moment or even your personal future, to reach into the web of time beyond time.

What you do here together, how well and how beautifully you do it, has implications not only for how cozily you will sit together in your rocking chairs in your old age, but also for every other living being.

We are all participants in the process of creating a species and a world that hums with peace and is informed by love. This is our highest heritage, and when we sanctify our relationships, the difficulties and insults they contain will be instantly diminished and what will stand in their place is the overwhelming presence of real love.

Sanctifying your relationship means seeing it not as an act of self-indulgence, but as an offering of love that you deliver up with joy to the fulfillment of its higher meaning. This entails not only an attitude of acceptance but also two behaviors: making speech and keeping silence. It means verbally acknowledging this higher truth to one another:

- "Thank you for being the instrument for the discovery of my purpose";

- "I know we have come together for an important reason"; and

- "I love you for being my way to see the holiness of life.

At times it also means keeping silence in your heart which is a thanksgiving of this higher purpose, or engaging together in a practice meditation which is walking together in spirit, a prayer that your purpose together be revealed.

Your love is a stitch in the fabric of All. To see it as such is to place your relationship in its ultimate perspective and to receive from it the ultimate joy.
- from True Love by Daphne Rose Kingma

homage to my hips

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
I have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

- Lucille Clifton