My Body: An Anthem of Acceptance

Art Photography by Julia King

One day when my last breaths bless these lungs and it’s time to set on that other journey, I want to be able to say:

I loved this body– my home of wonder and beauty and pain- I loved this body so well.

I want to say, I cherished my body like I cherished my dreams. Like I cherished the world. I learned to love it like one loves a child in the times of war.

And war it was– against my own territories. But I brought peace- and it wasn’t too late. I loved and loved and touched and praised where I had devastated my own lands, and set free what was taken hostage by my culture

I sang and sang over these curves and the belly and the weird toes and the childhood scar and every inch of skin and blemish and deficit and imperfection- I sang and loved, and made an anthem of acceptance

I sat in temples of sensation. I found the whole world in my womb. I lived in this flesh like one lives on holy, holy ground and I gave thanks for its miracle, its woundability, its sacred pleasure.

And when the choice was mine, I said, no, thank you, I will not squeeze my soul into the corset of a perfect body- I’ll be my own, wild and wise and yearning body–

a body that knew how to cherish herself and the world, all the way till the end.

~Stefana Serafina