Red Cedar

something that has struck me since returning to the gym is how much i missed seeing the bodies of other women up close and unclothed – and i don’t mean in a voyeristic, thrill-seeking kind of way.

you see, when they aren’t in magazines, women’s bodies are lumpy and scarred, and parts of them are bigger than mine, or smaller than mine, and they sometimes are a little lopsided, or out of proportion – sometimes they are pregnant, sometimes they are missing an eye, or even a limb… but in all they are the bodies we women inhabit every day, that propel us in the water or on the forest trails, that get us to work and back, that birth children, and that just exist… mostly in a world that idealizes bodies nothing like their own (despite all the feats of these lumpy, scarred, bigger, smaller, lopsided bodies that they posess).

it’s not a matter, for me, of looking at other women in derisive comparison (oh look – she’s fatter, older, more hobbled than me!) – but of looking around to appreciate real bodies for just what they are, and recognizing mine is not worse than most, nor better – and that magazine and movie bodies really are a cruel fiction.

i know, i know…. of course everyone knows this – but it’s easy to forget, walking around in the world of the clothed. i find that the daily interaction with women in the locker room makes me, on the whole, a lot easier with my own body – which is an added side benefit to working out in the first place.

and incidentally – i swam 22 laps today, plus 8 with the kickboard (working on my leg technique) – and the laps are getting just a little easier each time (i’m doing less of the easy backstroke, more crawling).

the kronos quartet plays phillip glass, released august 05.

i don’t know what it is about the music of phillip glass that makes me feel so heartwrenchingly melancholy. when bob everton died last december, i drove around in my car aimlessly a lot with glass on the stereo – the patterned nature of the music, with the occasional minor-key melodies, seemed to speak a story about life’s growth and decay.

it’s the same feeling i get standing on top of an alpine ridge looking at a vista of ancient mountains and skies – heartbroken by the beauty, small in the bigness and young in the timelessness of the landscape.

very few musics do this to me, and despite the intensity of it, i’m glad for those that do.

i’ve been invited to a thanksgiving dinner here on the coast tonight. this is my contribution: a bottle of good red wine, a loaf of fresh baked bread (a little crusty, but still tasty), and a cranberry, orange, walnut tart.