Every Body

I’ve been back in Brazil for a month now and it has been raining enough that our precious lake at the Eco Aldeia is finally returning! It’s been at least three years, but more like five, since we really had any water there. Every time I see the gentle ripples dancing across the surface I get filled with joy. The white herons are slowly coming back, filling the air with their calls. So many creatures! So much life! Everything is GREEN!! I feel changed by the three months I spent in California and everything that happened during that time. Trump was elected president right before I got there and I came back soon after his inauguration. I got to participate in the Women’s March in San Francisco while I was there and we just comemorated International Women’s Day here with a sweet group of women from the local community, including me and three women from the Eco Aldeia, and altogether we ranged in age from 4 to 76! At the end of the gathering we did a ciranda together, a circular dance that women used to do as they waited for the men to come back from long fishing trips at sea. It’s like we’ve been waiting for our own selves to come home as women! I was touched to be in this circle on this special day.

Right before I left California I worked at a women’s retreat at a beautiful center in the mountains in Aptos. It’s called “Adult Girls Into Women,” and is a year long initiation program over five long weekends throughout the year. We started the fourth module on February 2, Yemanja Day. Yemanja, the Queen of the Sea, is an Orixá, or nature based deity with African roots recognized and celebrated throughout Brazil as well as in many other Latin American and Carribean cultures. Last year on this day I asked Mother Yemanja to heal my mother who had just had a hysterectomy due to ovarian cancer. I posted an image of Yemanja on my Facebook page with my prayer. Soon after I posted it, however, a woman commented on it requesting that I not “whiten” the image of Yemanja as she is African and therefore black. The image of Yemanja I had posted was actually faceless, and I replied that MY mother Yemanja comes in all the colors of the rainbow and while I want to be respectful of her suffering and frustration due to racism, attacking my choice of images on my Facebook profile will probably not relieve her feelings. I went to the beach that day to make my offering to Yemanja, and when I arrived there was a beautiful, full rainbow stretching across the sky from end to end, plunging into the depths of the ocean! I sang, and prayed for my mother’s healing, awed by the power I was witnessing. One year later, before heading up the mountain to join the other women for our retreat weekend, I once again went to the beach to place my rainbow of roses in the waves one by one in deep gratitude, as my mom has gotten through chemo and is doing great!

There were seven women participating in the course, plus our medicine woman and guide Luzia, and me. I guided us in a movement meditation each morning and we had rituals each night. All but one of the participants, the youngest one, was either going through a divorce or separation or had already gone through one, and it made for an atmosphere ripe for empowerment as each one reclaimed her individual identity. We sang and drummed and danced that first night, celebrating Yemanja and the diverse group of women that we are, kicking off our weekend together. It rained a lot, which felt like pure, liquid affirmation of our sacred time together. I was reminded how much I love working with the body, with movement, and with women, as each of us practiced reclaiming ourselves, our bodies and our experience. Global dischord around gender and identity get lodged in our bodies so that it can be difficult to feel what’s true for ourselves. Working with breathe, movement, pleasure, and rhythm, we can find the space and time to come home again in our bodies, and feel safe and recognized as a sentient being alive on this planet before we are recognized as anything else. The collective sense of relief and joy was palpable by the end of the weekend.

As soon as I got back here to Canoa Quebrada we started our sixth Permaculture Design Course at the Eco Aldeia Flecha da Mata. The week long course has been mostly administered by men, including my husband, and last year I was frustrated because I felt that my body consciousness classes were not taken seriously by the other administrators. This year I was determined to stand more firmly as a representative of the feminine, and of embodiment practice as an important part of the quest for sustainability. I taught two classes, which I call ReinCORPOra, and the second one was right before our weekly music improvisation jam here at Espaço Flecha do Mar. It turned out to be one of the best jams we’ve ever had because lots of dancing happened! It’s primarily a music jam, and we put out a vast array of instruments and sit in a circle making music. Sometimes people dance, though usually it’s me and often solo, but often people are too timid, even if the music gets way good. This time, with the group from the permaculture course, many of us were dancing the whole time, and of course it makes sense, because we had taken the time to drop into our bodies before the jam started. At the end of the week, in the closing circle, every single participant commented that they really appreciated the embodiment classes and I felt satisfied and encouraged to stand up for this work.

As our daily news reflects the deep state of confusion and hate that still abound on the planet, I trust that it is part of a larger process of awakening and enlightening. We can be imprisoned by our bodies, or we can be emancipated through our bodies, but the latter can only happen if we love and accept them. Of course we are inately creative beings and love to express ourselves by adorning, painting, or calling attention to our bodies in different ways, but much of what we do to our bodies is in an effort to change them to fit some identity to which we feel bound, especially us women, even to the detriment of our health and well being. It’s not just because we are vain. Deep, culturally rooted misogyny, racism, homophobia and hate are very real in our world. Sadly, right after I got back here news hit of the cruel beating and murder of a transvestite in Fortaleza, and the video that the perpetrators made of it and were circulating.

Public outrage and a demand for action have come in a flurry, but events like these hit home, because Dandara, as she was known, was not hurting anyone, but merely living her life as a marginalized human being because the body she was born with was not the sex with which she chose to identify. Without knowing any of them, I feel certain that the people who committed this crime were acting out the hate and violence they feel towards their own bodies. Identity comes from who we are on the inside, and not just the body we inhabit, the same way you can’t judge a book by its cover or a product by its packaging. I feel that a general disconnection from the body is at the heart of all violence, and so making peace with our bodies must be part of the remedy.

I pray it keeps raining. I have yet to dunk my body in that rising lake water, and it’s probably better to wait as new rains also bring all of the pollutants that have accumulated across the land, but who knows. Maybe it will be even higher this time, fill with even more fish, and maybe it will stay longer. Maybe it will get so deep our feet don’t even touch the bottom!