Mystic Venus

January 05, 2019

Drowning.

It occurred to Pooh and Piglet that they hadn't heard from Eeyore for several days, so they put on their hats and coats and trotted across the Hundred Acre Wood to Eeyore's stick house. Inside the house was Eeyore.

"Hello Eeyore," said Pooh.

"Hello Pooh. Hello Piglet," said Eeyore, in a Glum Sounding Voice.

"We just thought we'd check in on you," said Piglet, "because we hadn't heard from you, and so we wanted to know if you were okay."

Eeyore was silent for a moment.

"Am I okay?" he asked, eventually. "Well, I don't know, to be honest. Are any of us really okay? That's what I ask myself. All I can tell you, Pooh and Piglet, is that right now I feel really rather Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All. Which is why I haven't bothered you. Because you wouldn't want to waste your time hanging out with someone who is Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All, would you now."

Pooh looked and Piglet, and Piglet looked at Pooh, and they both sat down, one on either side of Eeyore in his stick house.

Eeyore looked at them in surprise. "What are you doing?"

"We're sitting here with you," said Pooh, "because we are your friends. And true friends don't care if someone is feeling Sad, or Alone, or Not Much Fun To Be Around At All. True friends are there for you anyway. And so here we are."

"Oh," said Eeyore. "Oh." And the three of them sat there in silence, and while Pooh and Piglet said nothing at all; somehow, almost imperceptibly, Eeyore started to feel a very tiny little bit better.

Because Pooh and Piglet were There. No more; no less.

Have friends who are there for all seasons.

Mystic Venus.

January 05, 2019

by Unknown, in

The beginning of happily ever after.

“My friend musters every bit of New Age jargon she can fit onto her tongue and says,

‘What if you are the love of your life?’

I think, ‘Oh my god, I hope that’s not true,’ because I am absolutely not my type.”

Poem from Andrea Gibson.

What a tragedy it is,to not be your own type.

To go out looking for someone who you cannot be!

To implicate another human with qualities that you yourself cannot attain.

You want someone to love you whole while you cannot even love the shape and design of your own body.....

Start being your own type.

-the wake.
Mystic Venus.

January 01, 2019

by Unknown, in

Behold.

Its a new year,

You join the thrill and the excitement.

The travel,the company and yes,the food.

but when its all over,you go back to face your own demons.

back to the struggle and the tears.

nothing has changed.
nothing is new.

No prince charming is coming to save you,
You got tired with the prayers,
Tick tock..... no one is coming to rescue you from yourself,
from the critic in your mind,
from your own low self esteem,
from your own dissatisfaction with yourself and your life,

The beginning of the wake,
you stop waiting.....
You realize that,
You are the one that you have been waiting for,
And that only good decisions and self Love will save you.

Ignite your spirit.

Begin your wake.

Hold the gift that is life firmly into your hands.

Shameless, row it down to your own direction.

Happy new now!
Always.
Mystic Venus.

December 27, 2018

by Unknown, in

The beginning of the wake.

For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the spirit is the true self,

not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger.

--Marcus Tullius Cicero

Who are you?

You are who you are,

The awareness behind everything.

Act as such.

-Mystic Venus.

December 13, 2018

by Unknown, in

The moment.

Who am i?

and what am i doing here?

I ask over and until i go numb.

There is nothing but the echo of silence in my mind.

If am not my body,
If am not my mind,
Then who the heal am i?
-the wonder and the beginning of the wake.

❤❤❤ Mystic Venus.

May 21, 2018

by Unknown, in

Embracing your body.

I was 4.2 Kgs when I was born. Yep! That’s how I landed in this world. All fat and screaming. I know that that isn’t a big deal now, but this was in the late ‘80s and 4.2 Kg baby, that was news!

My mother, Mary, was in Form Four then and being pregnant at that time carried with it a sense of shame, to herself and her family.

If this same fate befell you, your life would never be the same. You would be the talk of the village and Daughters were told not to hang out with you because you had performed a sinful act of getting pregnant (having sex) before marriage. Your parents would be seen as failures and your father would not talk amongst the “wazee” and his dreams of you becoming a pilot would have “drank water”

****

She was just about to sit for her exams when she went into labour. However, she still did her exams in that condition because her mother, at that moment, was a single mother who couldn’t take any excuse.

Whenever my mom narrates this story to me, she reminds me that it’s still the single most courageous thing she has ever had to do; after all, she had the option to abort.

Her entire class, the entire village as well, came to see me on the day I was brought home from the hospital. Let us say, I was already famous: a 4.2 Kg baby! All these redmeat and mukimo…lifestyle concerns were a scam back then.

And, thus, my struggle with weight started as soon as I was born.

Throughout early primary, I had a name in reference to my body; Esther Kanono, as if fat was my second name. When I was in class three, I changed school. Because my parents thought a girls’ only school was more appropriate for me. My new school was the best girls’ school around but it was almost three kilometers away which meant I had to walk each day to and fro. There was no other option back then, school buses were an unheard of luxury. Weight issues and I parted ways at that point because I had to walk six kilometers each day and handle school work too on githeri for lunch only. So weight and I ended up separating. We walked on different lanes.

The issues with weight re-emerged when I got to high school. I wasn’t in the “fat” category, per se, but I had gained some weight and, so, I struggled to get back to where I previously was. There was one time when, after we closed school, I came home having gained so much weight. In four weeks, I didn’t eat, only tasting food as I cooked it because I really wanted to bring down my weight (The struggle was real!). That’s how I achieved losing more than five Kgs in four weeks.

Then I joined university. Again, I was a bit overweight according to my own measures. Here, too, I had to find a way to handle, to tackle, this “problem”. By the time I got to second year, I had lost much weight through exercising in the morning. On most days, 6 am would find me on the school track: that way I got to 50 Kgs – the weight I desired.

But I wasn’t happy. Not at all. Though my outside was what I could have termed as the “right” size and body weight, I was, nevertheless, unhappy. I had changed the outside but the inside remained the same.

Truth is, I have never been overweight in the real sense of it in my adulthood. This I can only speak boldly about years later and in retrospect. Even with my pregnancy, the highest I attained was 80 Kgs, a weight which, thereafter, I managed to bring down to my current weight: 65 Kgs.

My issues with weight were conditioned from childhood. The negative sentiments that followed the name Kanono were deeply embedded into my subconscious. The child in me, then, was bothered, and, as an adult, the sentiments still stand. This is because who we are taught to be, and who we are, in the first three years of life acts as a control center to our lives thereafter.

Scientists are now proving that negative experiences encountered within the first five years of life do cause more damage than those in subsequent years; because these years are crucial in the formation of the sense of self for the individual child.

Rarely, do we take into account the effects that words have on us, or the consequence of the names we give ourselves and our children. We forget that naming something also empowers it. A name creates. We forget that God spoke this world into existence, and thereafter man was requested to name the things in the world.

And, so, when I started studying myself as an adult, I started, for the first time, noticing how these subconscious beliefs controlled my life. I understood that for every effect there must be a cause and, when I finally found the cause, I was able to fix myself.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate

-Carl Jung.

I no longer obsess over my body. When I work out, it’s without a certain goal in mind. I simply shifted my focus from that “idea of perfection” in my head, to who I am right now. I decided to focus on who I am in the present moment, not what I believed was the “perfect me”. This change in perspective has brought such a huge sense of relief in my life. I no longer struggle with my body, it is what it is. I am who I am. After all the body yields to the vagaries of time and nature in spite of our costly care for it. Why then should I waste my energies disciplining and shaping it into a perfect figure instead of enjoying the time I have with and in it? The body is what it is, even against our wills and desires.

When you take a moment and sit, all by yourself, and contemplate long enough, enough to shed light in into the dark corners of your mind, you will notice the things that control you without your own awareness. Truth is, you are always controlled by your strongest emotions.

You just don’t wake up and find yourself in a place of acceptance: you have to work yourself through it. You get to a place of total love and acceptance by accepting your flaws, one by one and understanding that you are not in competition with anyone but yourself, and that you are not, and can’t be, anyone else other than you – and your body is no one’s but your own. When you get to a point where you love yourself whole, you rest easy; you stop struggling with yourself and enjoy each moment of you, each moment with you.

Everyone is judging you, but of all people you yourself are the harshest. You suffer most in your own hands. You can begin, now, to treat yourself with the kindness you would accord a child because deep inside you are still a child, it is not too late. It never is. We give to others freely the love and affection that we don’t give ourselves. It’s about time, to create a new way of life by loving ourselves whole.

You are whole with your imperfections, in spite of the imperfections.

Breathe.

April 26, 2018

by Unknown, in

Peeling back the mask to reveal strength.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

- D. H. Lawrence

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Marred with scars, we keep trying to run away from the person in the mirror. The person who stares back, reminding us of our helplessness. The world is too big and vast. We feel small and humbled at its sight because we know that there is nothing we can possibly do about that. There will be bruises on the walk through life. The scars will be there. They are there to stay.

So what do we do?

We start peeling back the layers that we can see; so that we can reveal the layer within. Who we were before we were torn apart and who we are in the aftermath. All through this there is the presence that doesn’t change. The kingdom of heaven within. The beauty within. The gold that we are told is hidden beneath the sand. That road is narrow and painful. Sometimes you dig so hard, your body will start to ache. Other times you will scratch the surface so hard that you will start to bleed. But you don’t stop. The pain is so fresh and familiar.

You still hold on to the comments they made when you were little. Somebody said your eyes were too big (compared to whose?). They said your nose was too wide, your teeth not white enough or properly arranged. They laughed at your flat chest when everyone’s was fuller and intimidating. You can’t forget the tout who had the guts to say that you were so ugly just because you refused to stand to listen to their nonsense. Then there is your skin color. You don’t think it’s good enough. You think it is not easy on the eye. And not smooth enough. So you dig in deeper.

They reminded you that you are hard to love. Over and over, with this and that and you started hating love but you cant. You desire it with all of you.

Lucky enough, there is a store at the corner of every street that promises to solve your problems. Albeit give you an image that won’t scare you in the mirror. And maybe, for once, you can love you and people would consider you lovable. So you get a plastic surgery, you bleach your skin, you enhance whatever you think is too small. You work so hard to make that package look pleasant and saleable. You tire for it.

At first you will love the results. You will take selfies. You will celebrate. But not for so long. The person within will creep back up on you. The shadow that you can’t really shake off. It will bother you to love it. Love me now, without the mask. Love its scars and flaws that you hid under the new package. Love the crevices, the shame, the pain, the brokenness that makes you who you are. The ones that remind you of your struggles. The ones that made you so opinionated. The inner person that knows to be real and true no matter what.

Before so long, you will start feeling ‘not good enough’. Again. The loneliness will give you sleepless nights. That tattoo you had will start to look funny. The make-up will not be enough to make up. You will start thinking of Botox and maybe some injections to make your menstrual friends appear smaller. Damn it! Don’t they just love to appear at the wrong time right in the middle of your forehead? Not one or two. Just enough to make every Maasai hawker walking around with those concoctions to stop you in pity.

Well, the struggle never ends. We never seem to have it all. Until we have it all. Because what we are looking for is not out there. IT IS DEEP WITHIN.

Until we are comfortable with the person inside. Until we love ourselves unconditionally and accept the fact that we can only be ourselves, nothing we do on the exterior will help. When you love you, nothing you see, nothing you hear, no worldly standard will make you feel unworthy or not good enough. You will stand proud of your ‘being different’ from their standards.

You will smile inside. You will have a friend to wipe your tears when you are alone. You will find peace within yourself. You become independent and unstoppable.

You will have arrived at yourself and you will realize that it was all you needed. To be at home with yourself. To be at home in yourself.

Storms will come. Oh, and they will! There will be moments of self-doubt. Sometimes the wind will blow so hard and you will be afraid that it might just pull out the nails on the casket that you buried. But even then, you will be still within. Why? Because you know that you will survive. You know what you are made of.

My point?

Love starts from within. You will have to shrink and go inwards first. You will have to be silent to listen to your own heartbeat. You will have to move to the rhythm of your own song because no one will sing it better that you do. Even if it’s bad, you, only you, sing it best. You will have to laugh out loud because there is no energy better than the one that comes out of your soul. You will have to breathe slow on other days and fast on other days. Depending on the rhythm.

Whatever you do, everybody on this planet is a visitor on a journey. Don’t let them define you. With their rules on what makes the cut and what doesn’t. On what is good enough and what isn’t. Craft your own path from within and let your spirit rise. Let the multitude of your sin and imperfection be covered within it. It’s only in love that we find perfection, completion and rest.

Come home to yourself and find the love within and it will show you the way.

Love always makes a way.

By Mystic Venus & Betty Cherotich.

Mystic Venus

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