Tag: writing challenge

Posted on

Wonder Woman Underoos and Yoga for the Soul

Day 2 of my 30-day writing challenge

wwunderoos

When I was around 5-years old, someone bought me a pair of Wonder Woman Underoos. I have a picture of myself wearing them. I have a little pot belly, a bowl haircut, and an underbite, but I’m five, so all of those things add up to cute.

I loved my underoos, and I loved Wonder Woman, but I was disappointed that my top didn’t look exactly like the one Wonder Woman wore on tv. I did not yet comprehend the architecture of the spangled bustier, which gave Lynda Carter’s cleavage its own gravity-defying superpower. I think I thought her costume was held up by magic.

lynda_carte

Physically, I have always been the polar opposite of an Amazon. I was a tiny kid, and I haven’t grown much since then. In (purely hypothetical) three-inch heels, I barely break five feet. Add my natural shortness to my chronic slouch, and I pretty much walk around infringing on hobbit airspace.

In my teens and twenties, I had a ferocious longing to spend just one day inhabiting the body of tall, statuesque woman. I didn’t want to be Wonder Woman or Xena on a permanent basis, I just wanted a few hours to tower above the crowd, kicking butt and taking names. Then I could go back to my ordinary life of needing step stools to reach everything.

When I was in graduate school, I took up yoga. When I started, I didn’t know vinyasa from a red vine, but within weeks, I found myself so much more aware of my body: how I moved, how I carried myself, the native strength of my muscles and bones. I didn’t magically transform into a warrior princess, but I remembered to straighten my spine. I stood taller. I held my head high. And doing so made me feel more confident – physically stronger, but also more of a presence in the world.

(I remember watching a Ted Talk about this. Posture is power. Women who take a minute to manspread before a meeting, whether sitting down with legs apart, or standing up with shoulders squared and a wide stance,  feel more confident and are perceived as more dominant. They channel their inner superhero, and others respond accordingly.)

A similar thing has happened to me since I’ve been practicing spiritual disciplines as part of my training to be a spiritual director. Just as yoga encourages you to make space within your body for your own breath – to stand taller and more deliberately, with strong core muscles and a quiet mind, the spiritual disciplines – approaches to regular prayer, meditation, and Scripture reading that have developed over centuries of Christianity – encourage you to make space for God by exercising your soul.

Spiritual disciplines invite you to pay attention to your emotions, your imaginings, your conversations with God: the daily experience of God with and within you. They shape and strengthen your soul as surely as yoga shapes and strengthens your body. While they don’t give you spiritual superpowers (whatever those might be), they help you to become more centered, to breathe deeply and live freely, and to turn your face toward God.

I’ll take that over magic underwear any day of the week.

 

 

Posted on

Of Belly Buttons and Soup Dumplings (and a 30-day writing challenge)

Screenshot 2017-06-14 at 11.40.15 AM

Yesterday afternoon, my five-year old was lying upside-down and face-up next to me in our big leather office chair as I typed away on the computer. Her legs were sticking up, resting on the chair back, and her head was dangling off the bottom. She was clad in only underwear because of our hellacious New York heat wave.

Now, to understand this story, you have to know that my daughter has an enviably enormous innie. It is round and wide and deep and looks like a place an alien spaceship would land.

So, as I was tickling my girl’s naked belly and blowing zerberts on it, she suddenly got serious and asked me, “Mommy, did you know my belly button looks likes an inside-out soup dumpling?”

I paused for a minute to digest this, because she’s right. If you turned a soup dumpling inside-out so the seam was on the inside, then plopped it into a flesh-colored bowl with a little lip on it, it would look exactly like her belly button.

She continued, “My belly button is the dumpling and my blood is the soup.” Not quite as accurate, but certainly a decent analogy.

Then, she took her powers of observation and metaphor-making into the realm of philosophy by asking, “Why is my belly button a soup dumpling?”

As questions go, this ranks right up there with my oldest daughter’s question, at perhaps a slightly younger age, “But why do we all live in a yellow submarine?”

Fast-forward to this morning, and I still have no idea how to answer either question. But a quick internet search has revealed some fun facts:

1) Belly button plastic surgery – mostly for people with outies wanting innies – is a real thing, and it goes by the extremely fun word “umbilicoplasty.” This sounds like a word one says while bouncing on a trampoline, perhaps while keeping 6/8 time.

2) In 2005, the number of people getting umbilicoplasties was roughly comparable to the number getting butt implants.** I’m sure there is a profound cultural comment to be had, but I . . . don’t have it.

3) The word “zerbert” (synonym: raspberry) was popularized, if I remember correctly, by The Cosby Show.*** Before that, my family used a term we picked up from some friends. Their word was “boofa” – also nicely onomatopoeic.

4) Zerbert has no antonym. Which means one should be invented. Suggestions?

On a tangential note, I am an extremely lazy writer in need of major external motivators, and for that reason, am challenging myself to blog every day for the next 30 days. Expect random thoughts, humorous antics, the fruits of idle googling, and hopefully the occasional insightful post. It all depends on how much sleep I get and whether my kids oblige me by continuing to be funny.

*Photograph from Xiao Long Bao – Chinese Soup Dumplings Recipe

** Fun facts from What makes an innie an innie? And more belly button mysteries

*** Confirmed by Urban Dictionary