What does it mean to make your body a home when all it has ever known is the loud incessant chatter of rooms too full of thoughts so mean, you’d only dare say them to yourself? What is a home anyway, but something more than a house? More than this roof and this siding and this flower garden filled with things that some would call weeds, but you dare to call flowers--on a good day that is. When you can look in the mirror and feel “curvy enough” and “strong enough” and “loving enough” to know that home is nothing more than a subjective quality of feeling that you create.
Today though, you stack yourself up against the neighbors as if that must mean something. Because you’ve been taught that it must mean something, in an effort to preserve the “character” of the neighborhood. In the name of things like “health” and “happiness”. Although you don’t feel happy no matter how much “work” you put into yourself. Which is to say, your body could be a home but it isn’t.
And it won’t be. Not until you decide that “fat” and “thin” both look good on you. And they both have a seat at the table. And the conversation revolves around how you spent your morning or how you take your coffee, not what you look like. Your body won’t be a home without the feeling you create in it. The aesthetic of which only means something to you. Towards which you reply when asked about the supposed weeds in your garden.
“I am tending my flowers in the sunshine.”
Featured photograph by Ash James
Kim Buchwald is a writer whose work explores what it means to live life deeply connected: to ourselves, the present moment and each other. She is the author of Home: Meditations on living in the present. Kim lives in New Hampshire with her husband and can be found most often meandering through the forests of her New England home on foot or by bicycle. To learn more about Kim and her work, follow her @theartofgoodenough or theartofgoodenough.substack.com.
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