Nourish Your Animal Body
Writing Prompts, Reading & Reflections
What are your earliest memories of being in a body? When did you first get the message that something might be ‘wrong’ with your body? How did you get that message? Did you try to change your body then? If you wrote a letter to your body, what would you say? If your body wrote you a letter, what would your body say?
These are some of the questions posed in Sunday’s Rewilding Through Writing course. The topic, of course, was our relationship with our bodies. A topic that for various reasons (like many of you, I imagine), I've struggled with through the years.
Our class was poignant. We wrote about our bodies and our bodies wrote to us. We read aloud and listened to stories about touch, trauma, pleasure, and wonder and discussed the physical need to get things ‘out of our bodies’ through writing. Like many students expressed in class, when I don't write regularly, I feel irritable. With too many words, voices and ideas to digest, I feel stuffed and need to spill out onto the page before I can take anything else in. Sometimes writing is a mental exercise but most often for me, it is a somatic experience. Those of you who have read Awakening Artemis know that in many ways, the book — a memoir told through the lens of 24 medicinal plants — is about healing my relationship with my body.
My body has always loved me unconditionally even when she was broken and I didn’t love her back. I know she works hard, doing her best to help me thrive every moment of every day; making the most of what she’s been given and trying to cope with what she’s been denied. My body might be getting older, a little more weathered and a little more wrinkled, and though I’m still hard on her from time to time, I love her now and know that she is miraculous.
So today, I invite you to be loving toward your sweet, animal body. Be kind and listen to what your body needs. Let your body make lists of pleasure: foods, scents, sensations, experiences, activities, wants, and desires within reach. If life and time allow, cook a nourishing meal, take a long bath with drops of lavender essential oil, dance to your favorite song, go for a walk in the woods, or get cozy and read your favorite book of poetry. Take your body on a date and write about your time together. Let your body tell you what she/he/they truly hunger for.
Like Mary Oliver writes, in her poem ‘Wild Geese,’
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”1
The full-length poem is found in Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. New York, Penguin Press