January 6, 2015 – Living “pink” – as I see it

Listen to this post:

When I first started to write these posts three months ago, fearing I’d need ideas to write each week, I hunted around in my computer for things I’d already written and I ran across this in an email I’d sent to my friend Vicki about a year ago:

My success and happiness and capacity for creativity and inventiveness and all that I want, including health and fitness and a fulfilling and fulfilled life are linked to my being a girl, allowing myself to be supported and provided for – and to take sweet, loving care of my body, to make it a priority and feel precious and beautiful and lovely and grace-filled.

There is a sensory field that this statement creates that I’m yearning to live in – that of trusting and allowing and a quiet celebration of my femininity.

For the past several new years, I’ve come back to this as my intention – to re-orient myself at the start of the year.  In my upbringing climbing trees with lots of boys, there wasn’t much example of what it meant to be feminine.  I would not change my early life in any way.  It’s served me to know how to really work and get stuff done.  But, it has seemed to initiate this quest for living in another way – even when I didn’t know what that way was, or at first, even that there was one.

I see the sign posts along my way:  I’m drawn to movies like “My Fair Lady” and “Dangerous Beauty” where the masculine/feminine dynamic is the central theme, when life set it up so that I’d have a “room of my own” I made it pink and soft and flowery (but not too), I was immediately drawn to Alison Armstrong and her work when I heard her talk about what it meant to run a business and still be feminine. She has become a treasured teacher and has contributed to this evolution in me more than anyone or anything else.

There has been a lot of talk about “feminine” or “feminine power” in the personal growth world in recent years.  And, as much as there is a part of me that celebrates this, much of it has missed the mark for me – it’s female-oriented, but it’s still largely masculine! This has led me to define for myself what “feminine” means.  It’s so much more than girly-ness, frilliness, and pink.  It’s a powerful way to be alive.  The image that comes to me – and it’s a felt image, rather than a visual image – is one of resting in a hammock.  I’m supported by the earth and gravity, at rest and at peace, trusting that all is well.  It’s a receptive space.  I feel myself looking out from behind my own eyes without any need to change what I see, I just take it in. It’s appreciative, warm and gracious.

It’s also responding to what comes my way, and allowing what is being created to come to life, like a pregnant woman does with her baby.  I first started showing my art because I was invited by my friend Eleanor Harvey to do Open Studios together at our church.  And I discovered I was a teacher because of the painters who kept asking, finally dragging me out from under my fears, to share what I know about painting watercolor. What was born of this is now my life and livelihood, without my intending to.

Through Alison’s work I identified my “noble qualities:” Freedom, Connection, Illumination, Trust and Loveliness. This is who I can be when I care for myself.  I felt I needed some kind of “permission” to become feminine – I had no connection between feminine and important.   I first needed to know that what I bring to the world from here does not just matter, but is actually what the world thirsts for.  Because the feminine is motivated externally, I keep reminding myself that self-care is not selfishly done just for me, but for who I can be for Joe, my family and friends, the painters in my groups – for my paintings, for you.

And it’s really hard to stay here – the feminine is overshadowed in our world by the masculine – taking action, being productive, accountable – making stuff happen. I often find myself charging into my day, my life, to-do list in hand, forgetting it entirely. And now that I know of what it feels like to be feminine in this way, it’s increasingly painful to do this. The sensitivity I shared last week is being revealed to me.

Here we are at the start of a shiny, new year and I sit again with this intention. I feel tender in my desire to live feminine; I am humbled by the strength of my deep-rooted habits that keep me running right over taking care of my body and need for rest and quiet time.  I look at my year-after-year desire to live more this way and say to myself, I’m still “here.” If I look back just a little, it’s hard to see progress. But if I head back 10 or even 20 years in my life, it’s clear I’ve come incredibly far.

This brings me back to my post about our old oak tree and its example of the long, season-after-season maturation needed to bear fruit.  What has just been revealed to me in this very moment, is that the feminine way of becoming feminine is to just allow it, in its own time.  It’s the ingrained “make it happen” in me that is having a problem with how long it’s taking!  That urgency – kept in balance – is good too, it keeps life moving along.  We need both parts.

While writing this post, I happened to glance out the window of my studio and saw the full moon just before going out of view for the day, in the pink sky of dawn. Lovely.

Wishing you a lovely day,

Cara