Note: This essay mentions depression and my ongoing issues with body image. If these topics are difficult for you, please feel free to skip.
I recently purchased Anchored: A deck for healing by
. Follow the link to find out more about purchasing this deck. It’s a new addition to my collection but I cannot recommend enough.Even though the business of daily life hasn’t granted me as much opportunity to sit with it, on this slow Sunday morning it led to reflections in my journal that I feel compelled to share.
Todays card is beauty. It discusses the way society views beauty, and how it is necessary to dismantle to our relationship to beauty. It has to do with seeing the beauty of everyone and everything, particularly those in marginalized communities. It also asks us how it is possible to hold the juxtaposition of beauty with the ongoing difficulties that exist in todays world. Again, I am reminded to soften into both/and thinking. It is especially important as I ride the waves of depressive episodes in the evenings after these long, long days. It can be quite easy to hand over my heart to despair.
I’ve discussed previously how important it is for me to stay engaged. As one recovering from alcoholism, the Great Numbing of my life kept me unplugged from reality. It is my goal to stay as plugged in as I am able, while also allowing myself space to process, learn and feel. This theme becomes ever-more-present in my days as I continue to come back to life during these almost 7 years of sobriety. It is known to me that if I do allow despair to take over, my sobriety will be handed over not long after.
This card reminded me of my daily walks. I often walk through this tiny town to go to our local post office. Our town is too small to warrant at-home mail delivery. So, I walk and I notice. Often it is easy for me to see overgrown houses or building falling into disrepair on these walks (or even as I drive in this area), and find beauty there. There is a lot of buildings and homes in the Midwest that have been left abandoned, falling apart, forgotten.
From my journal:
While there is a certain beauty to the reclamation to some of this territory ‘to the wild’ to me, it sings more of a song of how the Midwest is a dumping ground for all of the people, jobs and infrastructure society deems ‘ugly’ or not useful. So much of society wants the benefit of certain things without having to face what it entails. I can find the beauty in a house that is rotting, but at what point do we recognize that leaving so many areas forgotten is going to lead to more division? People in the Midwest should not be deemed a “flyover area.” Entire beautiful lives are lived here.
Let me be the first to say that I am guilty of this. I spent so much of my life wanting to get out of here. It’s honestly easy to fall into this mindset when growing up here because so much media focuses on bigger cities. Job opportunities are concentrated there. Community is easily found there, especially outside of the church. At least, this was my understanding growing up.
It took the realities of adulthood, raising children and very real cost-of-living numbers to shock me into realizing that these moments of seeking other places had me out of my body and out of this place. Leaving the Midwest isn’t going to solve my problems. Cultivating a life I love here, and tending community here is how I make a difference. It simply makes me long for a society that cared more for all people and all spaces.
I have a lot more to contemplate about this card. I am sure I will journal on it further. I have my own ideas of beauty that must be reckoned with. My beliefs about beauty have been fully penetrated by the harmful ideas perpetuated by this culture. These beliefs have been harmful to myself and I am sure to others. It is important for me to acknowledge and slowly unravel these threads. I can continue to unlearn. I can continue to move into more spaciousness. I can continue to hold the beautiful and the ugly, and everything in between. Both/and, always.
stories when you try to find beauty look to your stories like the tale of tripping on stairs at your childhood best friends’ house and busting open your chin and your friends’ dad carrying you up the hill all the way home even in the blood and tears all this life contained in a scar an imperfection found beautiful
I hope to finish the new issue of iridescent explorations this week! I also have some new printables coming. Printables are currently included as a benefit for all subscribers. At six weeks, posts are archived and only accessible for paid subscribers.
-rikki
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I love your thoughts on all of this - time moving, small towns, beauty…. And your poem about the forgotten home is so beautiful