Author Archive for: erica08
Entries by erica08
Kirra Donna – USA
My stark white body against the uninhabited pavement gave me the feeling of what one might call an apparition, as if I was watching myself, completely removed from the situation, like an objective onlooker. The stabbing pain in my feet from the cold cement was the only thing grounding me to reality. Each drop of rain that fell fatefully over my body caressed me, and I began to feel reinvigorated.
I had fallen out of touch with what I like to call the “magic,” for lack of a better word. I had come to a point where I saw “beauty” and felt nothing; I took on the characteristics of a machine, operating on automatic (which unfortunately is not so uncommon these days). A monotonous cyclical pattern had taken hold, and I fled.
I think when I met with Erica I had come unconsciously seeking a state of mind long gone; a mindset that appreciated the profoundness of small wonders; like a perfectly round stone or the only purple flower in a field of green. Magic.
I was visiting from Montana (and had come seeking Atlantis), so Erica and I had a short window of time in which to make everything happen, and her warmth and attention was well received.
At the point we met I was already quite at peace with my body and had no qualms about stripping down bare, which is more or less surprising after having gone almost the entirety of my life with what most people perceived to be an eating disorder. But that was never the truth. The truth is I was and have always been a very skinny person and it has almost always been perceived as a weakness.
There are two sides to every spectrum. Some are born big boned, I on the other hand am naturally small. I think more than anything my decision to participate in the Embody Project was somewhat of a declaration to the all-that-is. Not that I was out to prove anything, but as I spun in circle after circle it was as though I was screaming at the top of my lungs without making a sound.
I felt ALIVE and I was THANKFUL.
It’s funny to me how sometimes you have to leave in order to remember what you already knew.
Sierra – USA
I am free
and alive.
I am vulnerable
fully realized.
Some people have told me that I am pretty, and others that I am ugly. I rarely believed either was important. I was embodied. Regardless of what others saw, my body was my own. It was always there for me, and if I cared for it…it would care for me. The things that could not be seen are what made my body beautiful. I avoided seeing myself as ugly, but I also avoided seeing myself as beautiful.
I am surrounded
by energy.
I am a million pieces
coming together into one.
Then there was a boy. Landon. And when he looked at me the way I saw myself fell to pieces. He took those pieces from me, and built something new. Landon gave me back beauty. My body was no longer just mine…it was mine and it was beautiful. But old habits die hard, and sometimes I still see my body as just being useful. Then I’ll see Landon, and he looks at me like I am the most beautiful being he has ever seen. He helps me see myself.
I am bright eyed
and poised
I am sanguine
peaceful
accepting
flowing
Though the wind sometimes nipped at my bare flesh, the sun warmed me. It surrounded and illuminated me. The lake reflected me. The hay-bales lifted me. The crumbling stone building grounded me. The ancient tree wisened me.
I am free
and alive.
I am as I was meant to be
fully realized.
Sarajane – USA
There’s a temptation to reach for comparisons.
To draw parallels between my body and theirs.
To seek approval from myself and from others.
While approval can be sought, my true desire is for freedom.
Freedom is found when seeing my body not as good or bad.
But as my own.
The arms that hold the ones I love. .
The hands that write.
The legs that stretch and toes that curl. when everything in the world seems right.
My body is to be reveled in.
Arms wrapped around my waist.
Neck stretched and head tossed back.
Every curve inviting and every movement full.
It isn’t to be seen in contrast to another’s.
Not even as beautiful or ugly in an aesthetic sense.
It is to be breathed.
Absorbed.
Delighted in.
It is everything I am and only a small part of me at the very same time.
To be embodied,
I believe, is to be present.
To breathe in.
To believe that what I am is what I’m meant to be.
To be embodied,
Is to finally see.
To see each line and curve for what it is.
A small piece of the overall story,
of the entire picture,
the whole person.
A small piece of who I am and everything, all at once.
I am milky white.
and bourbon on the rocks.
I am soft and warm.
and notebooks upon notebooks filled with thoughts.
I am freckled
and a quiet spot by the window.
I am wide hips.
and black coffee.
I am full breasts
and conversation that gets to the heart.
I am red hair
and dance, dance, dancing all night long.
I am a myriad of flaws
entangled with a rapturing, fiery hunger for life.
Zack – USA
I Bow To My Body
i bowed to my body, yesterday; when i was four-five
taking baths in the tin tub, before we had indoor
my bow was in-sensed by my recognizing body parts familiar;
hands, feet, eyes, toes, elbows
mouth, my hanging angle towards left.
i bowed to my body and my body bowed back to me
then i was teased names; four eyed, knock-kneed, tall-skinny lanky-back on back
can U understand what i’m saying?
through all this, i been keeping on bowing to my body
loving the shades of black, brown char-coal blue.
and Body bowed back to me
as far as i can remember,
me and Body been coming into ourselves together
one on one, two by two
combined in a spiritual mix of violet hue.
and i bowed to my body
i first discovered sexual rising, guess Who?
Me and Body, mind, Spirit True
consciousness born in a mental hive of appreciation on Self
tapping back into energies re-known past caps of grace
caps for my head and private place
open to sacred body-ties’.
mind U: It’s been me and body all the way
bowing both in perfect time.
Oh Body Me, I have no qualms with Thee!
Bow Love
Zack 2013
Daniel – USA
One day while walking, a gust of winter wind chilled my human bones. Pulling my coat up around my shoulders, I shuddered. Instantly, my fleshy body disintegrated and scattered to the wind. Ten thousand crisped leaves appeared in its place. My breath now frozen into sparkling mist, it was also taken up by the invisible currents of air. I was all dry leaves and molecular debris, swirling and rolling along the frosty ground, up trunks of great trees and past dry grass nests of twig and string.
Birds welcomed me with spinning song as I drifted out over wild fields. I floated amidst treetops, over rocky cliffs, down cold rapids into streams and rushing rivers below. The elements that once gave form to my body spread out in all directions. Then the deep snow came. Biting ice and thaw and spring. Seasons became small moments. For decades I moved about with no intent. Particulate matter taken by whatever moved me. Creatures looking for food carried me in their fur. I traveled by talon. I traveled by night. I washed down into small crevices decomposing into dirt. I broke down wherever I was. Hundreds of years passed as I found my way deeper into the earth wet with worms. It was here I learned about real pressure. Real pressure indeed. Tons of earth pressed on me from all sides. The slow heaviness forced a certain silence on me. With this came the awareness that I was everywhere. Physical motion became a dream, a familiar memory. Yet instantaneous travel was very real. It was here where I learned to flash in and out of existence, to move without motion, to see with no eyes. The darkness was my vehicle into the void, the outer realms and inner realms alike.
But nothing lasts.
I was exploring a distant star when I felt it and knew to return. I was melting. What a feeling! What power! Glowing with billions of other small suns, I scorched my way through miles of metal and mineraloids, moving massive mountains, giving birth to myself. Vibration. Chaos. Expanding, I burned the surrounding lithosphere to black glass. I breathed steam and spit lava into the ashen sky. With hands of hot rock, I crawled out of the earth and oozed life onto the planet through perfect petrification. I seared my way into the surrounding valleys, and eventually slowed.
Following the violence, I found a calm state of restful recovery and warm recrystallization. Wind cooled my surface. Life grew out of my cracks.
Here I am.
Jenna – USA
Today, I celebrate my sexuality as a dynamic, daring and expressive force! I am cultivating a practice of coming back into the present moment to inquire, “What is truly alive in my body, where do I feel it and what does it feel like?” Today I am on the mountain, looking out at the landscape I have traversed to arrive at this breathtaking, ecstatic moment of clarity.
I speak from the earth. I am the foundation, the pelvic floor that holds everything up. My words come from the soil, the underside universe of roots and invisible life. And I need witness. I am your heart and your bones and your sex. Don’t you feel me? I am blood spiraling in your veins. I am red. I go down and down and down. I speak to your deep places that flow with the changing moon and tides.
Sexuality and embodiment are integral parts of being human! In my embodied understanding of sexuality, I see the full range of my body’s monthly changes, from the bleeding time to ovulation back to bleeding time. All life stages from birth to crone hood need to be honored.
I am dark. I birth. I die. I give death. I am born. I take all the forms that you see on this planet, I am spirit turned into matter, the Mother. You need to feed me, otherwise I will become ravenous. I will become terrifying. Sit with me in the bleeding times and feed my life with the one you are not growing. Tell every young woman that her blood is holy, that her blood is a gift.
A radically sex-positive culture is my vision, wherein both feminine and masculine expressions of sexuality are honored and where young people are educated about the power of their sexual life force.
I am the sparks that created you, the first light of breath that breathed and sparked insistence into what was just a disembodied thought at first. The fires of passion and ecstatic union are mine, and the deep, reverberating pulse of my sexuality ignites the world into being. I am a living temple, a sacred place, and everything contained in me is my sexual expression.
Embodiment is not always a celebration. I survived what I have learned to be the voice of the earth coming through my body to tell the story of the abuse, lack of nourishment, violence, life, and beauty; killing and in total denial of the feminine through how we as a modern culture inhabit her. Eating disorders are a modern dis-ease, and the gift has been learning that my body truly is the earth, and the earth speaks through me. It is time to listen.
I am fiercely devoted to Life. I am Life. Death eats me and digested I resprout. Death and I are the same creature. I am made of the bodies of all of your human and not-human ancestors, and one day I will be made of you. One day, I will embrace you and bring you back into the underside universe of roots and invisible life.
Scott – USA
The day of my photo shoot with Erica was going to be a cold one. Though I really wanted to do it out in nature, I seriously debated moving it indoors for the sole purpose of avoiding the cold air’s shrinking effects on certain body parts. As much as I truly resent the fact that it was even of the slightest concern, I have to face it and accept that the issue of penis size is for me, as it is for many men, a source of insecurity.
But in the end, I knew that I had to go through with it. I would deal with the cold air on my bare skin, and face the resultant diminishment of my most sensitive of extremities. After all, isn’t the point of the Embody Project to address body issues and to foster acceptance of the human body in its myriad shapes and sizes? What, then, could be more appropriate than to choose a setting that would force me to confront one of my own issues during the photo shoot itself? As I see it, the Embody Project has the potential to be the antidote to Mass Media’s all-pervasive message that your body must meet very idealized and narrow criteria in order to be acceptable. This project instead sends the message that the human animal has a wide range of appearances and that every single one of them is not only acceptable, but also beautiful. If it has the power to transform and heal the body issues of even a few of its viewers, to let them take comfort in seeing that people in fact don’t all fit this manufactured and limiting ideal of what it means to be beautiful, or sexy, or masculine or feminine, then I knew that I simply had to be a part of this wonderful, potential solution to a widespread, emotionally damaging societal problem.
The main reason I was so insistent upon having my photo shoot be in nature is that, to me, nudism is all about getting back to our own true nature. This is how we are supposed to be. If you see a chimpanzee wearing a shirt and pants, the absurdity of it makes you laugh. Why should it be any different for us? I’ve long felt that to wear clothes, except when necessary, (say, for example, while walking through the woods on a particularly cold day *cough*) is just as absurd as a chimp in a suit and tie. Nudism is the acceptance of ourselves as a part of nature, rather than thinking of ourselves as being separate from it or, worse still, at war with it and needing to conquer and tame it. So the decision to be photographed outdoors was very important and meaningful to me.
It was only natural.
SaNdRa* – USA
When I appreciate beauty in whatever it is: in the landscape, in people, in music, in our bodies, I feel like we are opening up in a higher level within ourselves and with the oneness we share with the rest of the people in the world.
As human beings in this physical world, we receive a body, a vessel to our soul. Like it or hate it, it’s the only sure thing we have for the rest of our life.
If humans would not wear clothes or any accessories we would be very similar. Underneath our skin we are all the same: flesh, blood, muscles, organs, water, systems, etc. Interconnectedness that resembles the micro and macro cosmos with all that is in our planet and our universe.
It has amazed me since very early age in my life how our human bodies function without us making any effort, it is the miracle of life. But at the same time we are powerful beings who can transform and heal our whole bodies with our intentions and thoughts or if we chose the opposite we can make ourselves sick.
Honoring my body with the right nourishment at all levels bring me in touch with my spirit. Being in nature as much as possible and sun-gazing have been lovely ways to ground myself, release the tensions of the world, learn from the stillness of our mother earth, reconnect with my higher self and experience self-love and self-acceptance.
That’s the reason why when I was invited to be photographed for this project in the first place what came to my mind was to do it in nature, honoring the sun. The wisdom of our ancient ancestors who were so connected with the sky inspired me. I knew that mother Gaia would allow me to let go of my shyness if I would feel it at any moment, and it was just like that. I was a bit nervous but Erica offered to be naked with me during our shoot. My apprehensions were gone immediately. We shared the moment as joyful goddesses playing freely without any boundaries. The beauty connected and inspired us.
Holding a mandala with a pre-Colombian symbol of the sun above my head I honor the sun, mother earth, the present moment, and myself. The sun activates our codes, remind us that we are light beings. Without the sun we could not have life on our planet.
This amazing experience grounded me, liberated me, released me from any thoughts I had ever had about my body or the public who would ever see me in this media. The same media that I bought into many times in my life; maybe since I was a little child, when I wanted to be like the girls in the magazines… with long blond hair. I have gone far since those times. I have been on a journey of self-acceptance and finding my own truth in my adulthood. A quest that has lead me to understand that we are all the same, no matter race, religion, social status, etc.
As Pierre de Chardin said: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.”
… And all of this too shall pass.
Michael – USA
I come from small-city Kentucky, a place on the Ohio River, spreading up into the surrounding hills and forests. I was raised on camping trips and too many books. It leaves its impact. I’ve always been quiet, prone more to thought, first, than to hasty action. I study philosophy, and that’s a big part of my life. That’s the short and quick of my history.
I did this for me. It gives me the opportunity to view myself in ways that I otherwise cannot. We are all embodied, facing out. We cannot go outside of ourselves and look back at how we move in the world, but we may gain some other perspective from our representations through art. Seeing myself in this way, I think, could tell me a great deal about who I am. A whole realm of interactions is captured in a single picture of my body in media res. My body’s attitudes and positions are expressed in relation to the goings-on in my environment. A picture of me naked, without all my everyday trappings and doing something I love, makes more explicit to me the unconscious ways in which I move and act. It’s the sort of self-knowledge that helps challenge my own subjective experience.
But the project also presented another opportunity. I wanted, as part of the shoot, to try to articulate some of the things I have been thinking about. That’s what I’m doing, there, in front of the whiteboard. The body is often absent in my discipline. When it appears, it tends to be a brute fact or a mere means to Mind’s ends. I don’t agree with this. I am my body, the emergent sum of all the microbes and neurons and bone and blood and flesh. I am my heart, my hands, my feet, my brain, my hair, etc. Moreover, there are always bodies; there is never just one. The dependencies of our own bodies on others are vast and intricate, a product of millennia of cell lineage, mutations, reproduction. You cannot and I cannot be conceived outside of the environments which generate and nourish us
If there is beauty and meaning and truth, why is it that we could not find it there, in the grit of things? Biologically, all bodies are different. I said this during the shoot, and both Bri and Erica laughed at the obviousness. But this fact begs a question: why are different forms of bodies not considered beautiful? The answer is articulated in others of these essays. In short, “beauty” in our culture is a construction of societal norms, themselves dependent upon a proliferation of idealized images in mass media. But the construction is not determinate of what you or I will think. What we may find beautiful might deviate from the unattainable, airbrushed ideals seen on screens and billboards. Who interests us, arouses us, inspires us, may constitute a challenge to the monolithic ideals of masculine and feminine.
By and large, I am happy with my body. Some find it beautiful. There are still times when I feel inadequate, that I, quite literally, do not measure up to what is expected from a man. It comes and goes, and I feel this despite my own experience. However much we challenge, the images are still there in our memory. The relation between culture and biology has been stressed by a prevailing ideology viewing the organisms and environments of the world as mere compositions of discrete parts, to be recombined for the furthering of (certain) humans’ interests. We think less and less about where we came from, what we rely on, and in the pursuit of affluence, we destroy both the world and the beauty in it. Environmental troubles and body troubles, I think, are very much interconnected symptoms of shared causes
I live in Memphis, but I miss the hills. Every time I drive back home, or to Asheville, I get excited when the road curves. It rises and dips, flows with the curves of the mountains. The road is in some way different every time. Whether it’s the time I am driving, or the colors of the trees, the blooms on the flowers. It’s unpredictable, and invariably, beautiful.