You are Sacred Land

You are sacred land.

Your skin, the rugged and dimpled map of where you’ve been as you’ve walked the earth. Each line, each crevice a small piece of your story. Each chicken pock scar. Each faded silver stretch mark of where your body stretched and grew, once.

You carry too, the stories that you tell yourself about your many parts. The judgments that cling to your back about how you look and what that might mean about you a human being. The forgiveness and ease that chosen imperfection allows. The tension or expansion of your personal narrative.

You are sacred land.

Your lips crack as the reservoirs of water within your skin recede due to lack of attention, when you choose coffee over water for the fifth time this morning. Because even this simple act of self-care is often overlooked in the name of heightened productivity when we wind ourselves up on caffeine and sugar to keep going past the point of our body being up for the challenge.

Your body contains rivers and oceans within it’s skin. It ebbs and flows, causing you to be full when the moon is full. This simple act of taking the time to honor your thirst and allowing that water to reach all of the dry territory within your cells creates life and fertile ground wherever it reaches.

You are sacred land.

The boundaries that you create are to keep you in instead of keeping others out. They are born of the sacred contract that you have with yourself, the vow to keep yourself intact no matter what. These are the promises to nourish this space, within your head and within your heart, by choosing whose voices you let in.

This is the oath of careful inspection, the way that you have taught yourself to become judicious about the stories that you take on about who you are and what you’re capable of. You are discerning here because you know on some level that what you imbibe becomes a part of you.

You are sacred land.

Yet, no one is going to come to your house to pull you out of bed and demand that you take care of yourself with the deep tenderness of a mother loving a child. No one is going to force you to treat yourself with the compassion that you ache for.

You are alone in the choosing here, because it is only you that can grant yourself permission to see yourself in this way. To treat yourself in the manner to which only you can allow yourself to become accustomed.

As a human who is beautiful, exactly as they are.

As a human who deserves to have their needs met.

As a human who is worthy of protection.

You are sacred land.

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