Wise Words: Our Most Precious Talisman

The abandonment and dishonoring of the body and its Powers is an ontologically disastrous error. In her brilliant and heartfelt essay “The Woman I Love Is a Planet,” Paula Gunn Allen writes that our bodies are our most precious “talismans” connecting us to the earth: “Walking in balance, in harmony, and in a sacred manner requires staying in your body, accepting its discomforts, decaying, witherings, and blossomings and respecting them.” In other words, one of the most politically radical and effective things that any of us can do is respect our bodies—and the bodies of others—in all of their manifestations and transformations. This includes respecting aging, fatness, weakness, male softness, female hairiness, bodily waste making, and even our sickness and death.

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In our healing and transmutational work, Paula Gunn Allen insists that first of all we need to cherish and honor our bodies, “singing Heya-hey to our flesh”:

The mortal body is a tree; it is holy in whatever condition; it is truth and myth because it has so many potential conditions; because of its possibilities, it is profane and sacred; most of all, it is your most precious talisman, your own connection to her. Healing the self means honoring and recognizing the body, accepting rather than denying all the turmoil its existence brings, welcoming the woes and anguish flesh is subject to, cherishing its multitudinous forms and seasons, it’s unfailing ability to know and be, to grow and wither, to live and die, to mutate, to change.

(Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, 1993, pp. 254 and 257)