What Nature Has to Teach Us About Loving Our Bodies

Today we are honored to have Caryn Mirram-Goldberg, Poet Laureate of Kansas, guest blog for Girlgetstrong.  As you know, October is breast cancer month and too many people have been affected by the long tentacles of breast cancer, whether it is a personal diagnosis or that of a loved one.  Caryn’s new book, The Sky Begins at Your Feet, is a tender but humorous memoir chronicling her tale of resiliency and love in the face of breast cancer.

She braves breast cancer, the breast cancer genetic mutation and the loss of a parent by connecting with an eclectic Midwest community, the land and sky, and a body undergoing vast renovation. Her journey includes swimming with stingrays in the Gulf of Mexico, searching for cream puffs for a Pennsylvania funeral, leading a group fighting to protect ecologically-essential land in Kansas, and helping students find their own voice in Vermont. In searching for a new definition of the erotic through our awareness of nature, this memoir illuminates how our bodies are our most local address on the earth.

So without further introduction – be sure to read the rest of her bio, below – here are Caryn’s thoughts on loving our bodies as we are, as part of the rhythm of the earth, instead of looking to an ideal that inevitably isolates us from ourselves.

~Melanie

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We’ve all been there: thinking our bodies so flawed that we’ll never be actually, truly, or even just a wee bit beautiful. My bout with breast cancer left me without various body parts, particularly one of the few parts of my body I always liked: my breasts, and it brought me six months of chemotherapy, three major surgeries, and many more minor procedures. But it also gave me something else: an understanding of how much our bodies are nature, in fact, the part of the earth most local to us. And just like the earth has its seasons and the sky its weather, so do we.

In my cancer all-night, 14-month road trip, I came to realize how I could see beauty in the scars on a tree trunk, prairie grasses leaning hard away from the wind, water rushing over rocks, land reshaped by erosion or new growth, so why not see beauty in my own body as part of the earth? The scars we all carry — some more emotional than physical — also tell a story of of our survival, and since life itself is a source of beauty, so are our scars.

At the same time, I realized how much looking toward sky and earth, branches and stars, so much better informed how I thought of beauty than glimpsing magazine ads showing women in size 0 bikinis or movies sporting female bodies that looked more like teenage boys with breast implants. One of the core reasons I wrote my memoir, The Sky Begins At Your Feet, was to cultivate a new relationship with beauty through my ongoing relationship with living in a specific place with its own patterns of weather, migratory patterns, flora and fauna.

Here is the wish that echoes through my memoir, one that has come true through listening to the living earth, and extending the same kind of appreciation for my own body that I feel for a sunset or winding road:

Let me learn this way of loving what’s imperfect from the land and sky around me, the best mirror to show us that what we do to our environment, we also do to ourselves.  As well, the earth where I live is the best teacher when it comes to persevering through the seasons with the kind of grace that celebrates life, however it comes – in the icy wind mid-winter that makes the windows tremble, the explosion of lilac one particularly slow spring, the reddening grasses late fall, the black sheen of the crow mid-day when he shoots across the sky to examine the latest addition to our compost pile.  Life just wants to live, so the old saying goes, and this desire makes for tremendous innovation.

There is little script in this culture for such innovation when it comes to women’s breasts. There is only the narrative everywhere I look of women made of curves and sleekness, women in clothing cut to highlight the roundness of breasts. Meanwhile, I feel like a 12-year-old with my bare chest cut so close to the bone. Meanwhile, the rest of my body blossoms so much older than the child I was. Meanwhile, the breasts in between past and present sleep on an invisible shelf.

So I open the door to the back deck, and stand outside in the middle of the night, watching the clouds travel past the waning moon, collapsed on one side because of the sun’s  particular slant of light at this moment.  I step outside again in the morning, the overgrown grass of early spring pouring over itself around the tilted cottonwood tree.  The hills and wind around this home carrying their own losses and scars, and yet lit with a green both pale and fierce, quiet and shining, fully here at this moment and on the verge of changing completely.  I return to earth and sky, continually coming home.

We can continually come home to ourselves and our own beauty, and the directions on how to get there are right now the window and over the threshold of our front door.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg received her doctorate from the University of Kansas and was recently appointed the Poet Laureate of Kansas. The author of four poetry collections, she is certified in poetry therapy and has led workshops for many groups, including people living with physical and mental illness. In 2000, Caryn founded the Master’s level program in Transformative Language Arts, that focuses on the effect of written and verbal language on the community, at Goddard College where she teaches.

Caryn co-founded Brave Voices with singer/songwriter Kelley Hunt to provide singing and writing workshops. Songs written by Caryn have been performed by the Kelley Hunt band both in the United States and Europe. Caryn’s musical talents also include playing the cello.

And somewhere along the way, Caryn managed to write The Sky Begins at Your Feet.