This is Love Letters From Your Body, the weekly newsletter that reminds you that body hatred is optional. I’m now accepting pledges for paid subscriptions! This means that, although my writing remains free for now, I’m setting up benefits for readers who want to pay a few bucks per month to access additional, love-centric content. If you know you want to support me and my writing, plus get some extra content to boot, sign up now to make a pledge. You won’t pay a dime until my new offerings are launched.
Did you hear that scientists recently discovered the origin of where the water in our solar system came from? The water that comprises about 60% of your body—this living, breathing body you’re inhabiting right now—originates from the space between solar systems, billions of years before the birth of our sun.
And as Geneen Roth says, your body is [quite literally, I may add!] a piece of the universe you have been given.
Isn’t that neat?!?!
Another notable planetary happening occurred this week, in the form of the spring equinox: the moment when day and night are roughly equal in length. Even though I love winter, the annual arrival of spring brings a lot of relief. The promise of warmer weather, longer days and the coming summer makes many of us rejoice.
It seems slightly contradictory, then, to be sending out a poem called “A Solstice Blessing” for today’s love letter because, well, we associate “solstice” with winter. But I decided to send it because it helps us to remember that our bodies, like the ancient water that comprises the majority of it, are indeed star stuff. Plus it has a clutch final stanza that is perfectly suited for spring. I hope you agree.
A Solstice Blessing
by Sheila Schuh
Your breath began long ago before there were lungs and before there were trees, your breath began in the darkness of gases that hung a long long sky from your song.
Your bones are the bones of your ancestors and before them, calcium in the seas. Your bones have been shaped in the darkness of wombs and long before, in matter flung far from your fingertips.
Your blood began in the flow of seas, dark and rough.
Before your tears, there was rain. And before your blood, veins and springs and storms and the primordial deep. Way deeper than your pulse.
Your curiosity began as lightening across the sky, your very nerves and every thought, every signal, the descendants of explosions and cosmic firings. Your insight and movement, ancient energies that acted long before your smiling.
You are the very stuff of stars. You are the dust left behind. You are a solar event. You are the keepers of time. Your sisters hold their place and shine the sky above you, and you no less, have such light inside you to offer the world.
Can you see that you are a child of the universe?
And that is why you know the earth is turning and dawn is coming. The darkness you have known, now and forever behind you, gives way to light, as it always has.
(Hat tip: I first heard this poem in a sermon given by Rev. Shawn Newton at Toronto’s First Unitarian a few years ago).
So today your body wants you to know this:
The love you want to feel for your body
feels exactly like the love you feel so easily for the earth:
grounded, mystical, informed by wonder and gratitude.
Tune in to the former, and you can sense it in the latter.
And here’s a bonus TikTok to prove it:
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Love,
Sabina (+ your body!)
PS: If you want to feel a love for your body that feels as easy as loving the earth, let’s talk. I’ve got 3 different coaching packages oriented towards identifying and removing the blocks that keep you separated from the love you deserve.