portrait of a warrioress :: a study in bravery

I adopted the mantra "do brave things" this year and when I think of brave, I think of Amanda King. She tells brave stories. She is a living sculpture of bravery. I hold my breath when I read her words, like these:

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All of you women with lines on your brow, with cracks between your fingers... it's been a long winter.  All of you, you are beautiful and so am I.

The thing is, my children are perfect.  I am the grown up, so I'm supposed to show them everything about life.  When they wake up in the morning, though, I stare at them and they're new.  They teach me everything.  They are babies and they teach me what it means to be a person.  It's easy to see that they're beautiful.

I am slow and I am tired.  I am round and sagging. I am harried.  I am sexless.  I am getting older.

I am beautiful.  How can this be?  How can any of this be true?

I don't want my girls to be children who are perfect and then, when they start to feel like women, they remember how I thought of myself as ugly and so they will be ugly too.  They will get older and their breasts will lose their shape and they will hate their bodies, because that's what women do.  That's what mommy did.  I want them to become women who remember me modeling impossible beauty.  Modeling beauty in the face of a mean world, a scary world, a world where we don't know what to make of ourselves.

"Look at me, girls!"  I say to them.  "Look at how beautiful I am.  I feel really beautiful, today."

~ From I am Beautiful, Girls by Amanda King

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I want you to meet Amanda because her voice is one to remember. She documents her days with vivid detail, writing about family, herself, and life with all of its sacred and inglorious moments. With raw grit and fierce honesty, she soul-spills:

They came home bigger than they were, before.

That, for me, is the key to loving myself.  It's about getting bigger, every day.  It's about not endeavoring to be smaller or prettier or more fashionable.  It's about not loving my possessions more than my experiences.  It's about growing things, food and flowers and senses of wonder.  I want to grow so big, I can't be stopped.  I want to grow so solid and real, I could hold my own in a forest of thousand year old trees.

Instead of counting my calories, I dig in the dirt.  I go out into the yard with a knife and bring in an armload of kale for my morning juice.  I write myself into a trance, where nothing is real and tiny sentences put the entire world in a shadow. I fall asleep at night next to my baby girl after spending all day in the sun, teaching her how to swim.  I don't lie awake anymore, worrying about how I'll look in my friend's wedding pictures.  I don't wake up and prepare myself for a day of not eating, or of failing to not eat.  I wake up and we have big bowls of strawberries on the front porch while Louise swings and swings and swings.

I make things.  I cut and I sew and I rip with my teeth.  Instead of trying to be beautiful, I make beauty out of the air.  I feel beautiful with a measuring tape around my neck and pins clenched in my teeth.  I feel beautiful when I create something that didn't exist before.   

~ From Getting Bigger to Get Beautiful

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Amanda inspires me to be authentic in my writing, but not only my writing. She inspires me to be alive. I read her words and I taste things. Hear her babies laughing. Ache with desire. See them eat strawberries on the front porch and I feel the wind on my legs as we swing and swing.

Until I was seven years old, I lived in a trailer park on the outskirts of a coal mining town in Pennsylvania. The children who lived down the hill from us didn't wear clothes. They wore underwear and nothing else. I used to stand on the front porch of our trailer and watch them squatting in the street, their naked torsos bent over long, naked legs, flipping over rocks and collecting worms after it rained. Those children didn't appear to have any clothes or a mother, either.

I had a mother. She was pretty and blonde and had yellow green eyes that nobody else picked up on their way out of her belly. All four of her children had eyes that were so dark that you could almost call them black, except in the sunlight they were brown. My dad had brown eyes and he passed his darkness on to us.

 ~ From I was Born in a Trailer Park

Maybe it is the darkness that makes her brave. I don't know, but darkness has a way of doing that, of carving bones into the shape of bravery and hammering out strong feet and forging souls of both gentleness and steel. I asked Amanda to write something for The Sacred Life, and it is dark and beautiful:

Magic 
by Amanda King

I live with the roots of trees.  There isn't a sky.

I was nothing, once.  So small, I floated here on the wind.  I fell, and then I waited.

There is some magic in being nothing.  There is nowhere else to go.  You have only the choice to be what you are, and long for something other.

When you are compact within yourself, an impenetrable thing, light reaches you in feathery fragments.  Some shifting of the soil might gain you a breath of clean air or a glimpse of something living, but mostly, you hold yourself against the decaying matter that holds you.

I hold my bones together, to keep them from breaking.  I hold my femur to my shin.  My tendons and muscles would tear otherwise, under the pressure of seconds ticking by, silently.  It happens that I fall apart, that some piece of me will suddenly snap and vanish, leaving a curling tendril of promise in its place.  I have lived with my head in my hands, my spine rounded and shoulders slumped.  Every moment of my existence is exquisite and tender, like a glistening pink mark where I've been burned.

The mark is where my body will split.  I don't know anything, a tiny thing in the dirt, but I will grow.

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Yes. She will grow, and so will I. So will you. Sometimes it feels like we are all tiny things in the dirt, covered and warm, and then miracles happen. We just need to have faith. Be brave. Let it be.

About Amanda: I turn seed into food.  I birthed slippery, beautiful children.  They were covered in my blood.  I cried and my tears made pools in the canals of my ears.  I am not a stupid girl, and I am smart enough to know what beauty means.  I make beauty out of the air.  I eat beauty for breakfast. I am not what you think a woman is. I grip at roots and veins in the muck of existence.  I vomit and crawl.  I bleed red like rust.  I am a person of the world. 

Read more at www.lastmomonearth.com. A great place to start is a list of her own favorite posts.

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