:: in which i'm Tangled up in Brave-ry

{via pinterest}

{over the next several weeks, maybe even months, i will be writing here and there from elora's thirty days of prompts. this is something that i have never done before, something raw and fresh and gorgeous and potentially painful. so please, be gentle with me. you can find all posts i have written from these prompts here}

every time i breathe, i am reminded what is like to be a woman in this day. every time i put my toes outside my own little circle, i find myself attempting to be swallowed by this creature that is confusion.

it's why i have so deeply adopted release as my precious word for 2013, and why it has been so hard to live the words i speak. or, in this case, type. more often than not, i feel like my soul competes for a place against the modern definition of "sense." in faith, in life, in motherhood, in the very essence of womanhood itself.

i found a poem someone anonymous had left with magnets on the bookshelf at the library today, as i sat and pondered being a woman, being a mother to a little dove-daughter who has woman brewing at her core. it fit, deeply, like a puzzle piece locking in a secret sacred place within my heart ::

worship Light through enormous shadow

rain, mist, storm will be

swim above

never beneath

dream

drive on

smoothly

luscious life can shine

:: author unknown, and they want it that way :: 

i sat with my little one today and watched Tangled. and sometimes we watch Brave and sometimes it's Beauty and the Beast. they're tales of princesses and true love and beautiful dresses, and people beat down my soul-doors and cry, how can you stand strong as woman but embrace fluffy dresses and princes on white horses?

did you know it's possible to acknowledge love and still embrace myself? because we all need someone, after all, and it's okay to have a bow and arrow in your back pocket but still look out the window and whisper, someday...

warrioresses have two hands, one for the bow and one for the Words.

{via pinterest}

:: but needing a warmth to curl against when the nights are cold doesn't make you a traitor to strength or a backstabber to progress. it makes you created with God-breath in your lungs.

because we all know He spoke truth when He murmured like breeze among Eden's leaves, it is not good that {s}he should be alone. 

and sometimes we just need to sketch the solar system on our palms and look down and realize that we are held in more than ink and skin but in Light and Breath from the lungs of Glory.

it's okay to release what you think you know and turn your neck so that you look behind you just to make sure that the Breath will carry you when you take that step off the cliff. and maybe you have to build your wings on the way down using the string from your bow and the feathers from your arrows.

but you're still warrioress.