The Invitation

I came across a poem the other day that encompasses everything to which I aspire for myself as well as everything I wish for you: my friends, family, and loyal readers. It says it all and once you read it, you will never be the same.

The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer



It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have reached the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it's not pretty, everyday, and if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes!"
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.


I urge you to meditate on this poem; print it out and read it over and over again. Hide it in your heart, as my mama used to say. I firmly believe that the lessons contained within it can sustain you and help you get through anything life throws your way, as well as any self-imposed hardships. And make no mistake, most of our hardships are self-imposed.


Learn the lessons, hold them dear. Be happy for the rest of your life. Seems unfathomable, doesn't it? It's not. It's absolutely possible.


If you have a situation about which you'd like to get a fresh perspective, please email me at thewellfedspirit@gmail.com. In 2011, let's turn this into the blog I meant for it to be: one that offers a listening ear connected to a kind heart. I'm listening. What do you have to say?

Until next week,
Feed on love, subsist on peace.

Hard To Love

It has not been an easy week. If you're familiar with my newly declared year-long journey, then you know I've recently made some drastic changes. The most so is my decision to go from wearing weaves/wigs for the better part of my adulthood, to wearing my own natural hair. My thin, sparse, now short hair.

The reason it's been so difficult is this: I don't know who I am without the long, luscious, diva hair. That's who I have come to think of myself as being. When I look in the mirror, I expect to see her. But she's not there anymore. It's very similar to mourning a loss. You may think I'm kidding, but I'm not. It's like that woman died a week ago and the person who remains is a stranger.

How do you move on when your better half dies? She was so confident and secure. She was sexy and desirable. She was aggressive and fun. She turned heads everywhere she went. I needed her, but I killed her and in her place is a fat, aging, insecure, uninteresting, plain woman. No one looked at me this week. I think if I hadn't talked to people, they would have hardly noticed I was there.

The hardest part wasn't letting strangers see me "uncoifed" (yes, I totally made up that word), it was being seen by people I know. People who know I don't usually look so...blah. Nobody said anything, except my husband, kids, and sister in encouragement, but that didn't stop me from feeling self-conscious. I felt like they were thinking, "What the hell happened to her? Is she sick? Is she dying? She sure as hell looks like she's dying."

I was so depressed. It seemed silly to be depressed over my appearance when there are people starving and living in poverty and abuse, but there it was. By the end of the week, I was in tears. Actually, it didn't take a whole week to reduce me to a pile of mush. It was closer to four days.

So after all the depression and self-loathing, after all the tears and arguments with my husband for not understanding, I couldn't do it. I lasted exactly a week. I decided that going from one extreme to the other was too drastic, too soon. Cold turkey is not for me. Sure, it worked for smoking, but that wasn't as big a part of my identity as this.

The result: I cut the back of my hair shorter and in layers for a little more volume and I have extensions (tracks if you will) on the left side of my head, so that my hairstyle is asymmetrical and full in the front where the natural hair is extremely sparse. It's not a full-blown Beyonce weave, but I don't look 55 years old anymore.

Now, I'm fully aware that the reason no one noticed me this week is less my appearance and more my attitude about my appearance. Unfortunately, my confidence is connected to the way I look. I can be fat with gorgeous hair or I can be thin with short hair, but I can't be either with thin, sparse hair. Until I change this about myself, extremes won't work for me.

Now I understand why it's called a happy medium.



Until next week,
Feed on love; subsist on peace

Operation: For the Love of Me

Today I did something that I haven't done in at least ten years. I cut my hair. What's so unique and special about that is what came next. Cutting my hair prompted me to embark on a year-long journey to self-love; Operation: For the Love of Me. It made me think about all of the things that I do out of love for others. I cook because I love my family and I want them to have nutritious meals. I'm active in the PTA because I love my children and I want to ensure they have quality educations. I've been on a quest to find my signature fragrance because I love my husband and I want to smell good for him. I even write this blog because I love my fellow man and I want you to be happy. 

What, though, have I done out of love for me? Don't wait too long for the answer because I'm still thinking. Like many women, I've left myself for last and then, eventually, completely forgotten about myself. I don't remember the last time I laughed until I cried. No, wait. I was watching an episode of Scare Tactics that had tears streaming down my cheeks. Unfortunately, that was about three months ago. At least. So to remedy this, I have decided that for the next 365 days, I will do something to care for and cherish and honor me.

I've started with my hair. I have worn wigs and/or weaves for at least the past ten years. My favorite saying was, "There is no excuse for a bad hair day." If you happened to see me strolling around Lake Montebello, you might have seen my real hair. But only if I didn't happen to have a cute ponytail to clip onto my own. So...twice. After years of gluing, sewing, clipping, drawstring-ing, and braiding, my hair was unhealthy to say the least. It fell out a few times at the top and back, it thinned out considerably, and I had started getting those bald edges that you see when one braids her hair a lot. My hair was shoulder-length with split ends, about two inches long at the top, and as thin as a newborn baby's. So I cut it off.

Here is a picture of me before. 

Note the long, luxurious hair masking the thin, unhealthy hair. Pretty neat trick, wouldn't you say? Oh, and making it worse I might add.

Here's a picture of me today. 

Wait for it...

Just to drive the point home, here are a few more.

  

It's what I call on-my-way-to-healthy. You have no idea how hard it was for me to post these pictures. Nobody but my immediate family has seen my actual hair for years. I wouldn't leave the house unless I had some sort of apparatus on my head. If someone knocked on my door and my hair wasn't all weaved up, I would kill anyone who dared open the door without first giving me time to put on a wig. I didn't care who it was either, my kids' friends, the mailman, the cable guy, my in-laws. Nobody was allowed to see the real me. I wonder why that was? 

Was it because for all my positive talk on this blog, I still didn't think the real me was good enough? Let's explore that over the next year, shall we?

I've made a list of all the things I believe I need in order to be healthy. This is just the jumping off point, so I may see the need in the future to add more.

1. Drink eight glasses of water/day

2. Take Vitamin D pills (my doctor swears by them)

3. Exercise one hour/day

4. Eat more healthy foods than nutritionally-challenged foods

5. Wash my hair twice/week

6. Trim my hair every six weeks

7. Grant myself the time to soak in the tub at least three times/week. 

8. Meditate for 15 minutes/day

9. Write something everyday be it a page, poem, prayer, chant, or grocery list

10. Forgive one person/day

11. Forgive myself for one thing/day and write it down so I won't forget it.

12. Listen to my children's actual voices for 10 minutes/day. This may seem weird, but I realized the other day that the whole day had gone by and I hadn't actually spoken to my oldest son. We had sent several text messages, though. 

13. Hug my family everyday

14. Listen to my husband vent/rant about his job for 10 minutes/day

15. Tell more jokes. I don't think I'm funny, so this won't be an easy one. 

16. Spend less time around vampires. Yes, I said vampires. You know those people who suck all the energy and life right out of you? Vampires.

I'm inviting all of you to join me. Let's make this the biggest movement our generation has seen. OPERATION: FOR THE LOVE OF ME!!!!!!

And in the spirit of keeping my promise to myself, here's a joke:

A man and his wife were having some problems at home and were giving each other the silent treatment. The next week the man realized that he would need his wife to wake him at 5:00 a.m. for an early morning business flight to Chicago. Not wanting to be the first to break the silence, he finally wrote on a piece of paper, "Please wake me at 5:00 a.m." 
The next morning the man woke up, only to discover it was 9:00 a.m. and that he had missed his flight. Furious, he was about to go and see why his wife hadn't woken him when he noticed a piece of paper by the bed ... it said... "It's 5:00 a.m. Wake up."

Until next week,

Feed on love; subsist on peace.

Even Better Than You Think

Today I was reading the City Paper (I adore the City Paper) as I do every week. I'm not a big believer in horoscopes, but I do like to read it just for fun sometimes. A smile crept slowly across my face as Rob Brezny, author of the Free Will Astrology column informed me that the changes I'm in the process of making this year are "potentially so dramatic that you will, in a sense, be inhabiting a new astrological sign by January 2011." I'm going to be a whole new person in less than a year's time. Nice.

What struck me about his column was not all the awesome changes that he quite authoritatively stated I would experience, but the "homework" he assigned to his readers: "Imagine yourself gazing into the eyes of the person you were 10 years ago. What do you want to say to him or her?" I had to catch my breath for a minute. The very thought of being able to "forewarn" my younger self gave me goosebumps. What would I say to my 28-year-old self? Well...let's find out.

"Shawna,
You are good enough just the way you are. You may not be a perfect human being, but you are absolutely the perfect Shawna McCoy. You deserve love and respect and kindness. You deserve peace. But the only way you will find true love, happiness and peace is from within yourself. No one can make you happy, but you. People, possessions, and other things outside of yourself may give you cause for happiness, but true happiness comes from within. Stop looking for others to make you happy; that's your job. Each person is responsible for making the most of his/her life. Don't put that burden on others because you're responsible for you.

"In a few years you will find yourself repeating this mantra, "I'm better than I think I am." It will surprise you to realize how much you second-guess yourself. Let's start repeating that mantra now to remind you that your intuition has never failed you. Intuition is the voice of God. You will tell your children that often in the future, but I think that's a good thing for you to learn now.

"All the anger and bitterness that is clouding your heart and mind right now will no longer hold you back. You will not be afraid to be vulnerable in order to protect your heart from pain. You will be loving and affectionate. You will be patient and kind. You'll even be funny sometimes. You will be all the things that you pray to God every night to one day be.  It is a wonderful feeling to not live your life in fear and I want you to know that you will know that feeling.

"Please try not to be so hard on yourself. You are doing the best you can. And it is good enough. I love you. I REALLY LOVE YOU. Exactly the way you are."

So, what would you tell your younger self? Reply to this blog to let us know or go to freewillastrology.com and click "email Rob" and let him know. It was his idea after all.

Until next week...feed on love; subsist on peace.

Shawna