Healthy Living, Healthy Soul

This week, I plan to post some ideas on healthy living—tips on cooking and eating healthy, ideas for fitting exercise into a busy life. The goal won’t be calorie counting or losing weight or punishing bodies that enjoyed too many Christmas cookies. Instead join me on this search for beauty already in us and fewer distorted self-images, more energy and fewer discouragements, more life and less failure.

But first, on day 1, we look within…

Throwing Out the Distortion

I pull out the mixing bowl and dump the pizza dough onto the pan. Evan stands beside me, elevated on a kitchen chair, hands clean and ready to press.

I laugh. My reflection in the curved metal of the bowl gives me arms long, reaching far. My pink shirt extends wide. My frizzy hair, is well, still my frizzy hair.

I look funny. Stupid. And wide. But I feel beautiful in that moment when I’m a mom with my excited son, creating pizza for our weekend family pizza party. Rain drips outside, family tucked cozy inside a home that smells like a pizza parlor.

I choose the moment’s truth—the beauty instead of the distortion in the mirror.

Kindness Showing Beauty

The next day, I watch Evan pluck a purple flower from my garden and place it behind Renea’s ear. Ahh. I see how my little girl is loved. Her beauty amplified with her brother’s kindness.

Like so, you are loved, your beauty appreciated, your kindness adding to the world around you.

Beauty Reaches Out

My orchids hang along the gray wall, their roots straggly, their leaves forgettable. I water for days turned months. At last delicate purple petals stretch out from the pot. Color reaches out from the gray.

I want more of this in my life—surprises of color grown out of the hard things.

Join me?

Will you join me this week as we look for true beauty, energy, life and color through our cooking, our eating, our exercising, our thinking?

photo credit, maarjaara