Beauty of a Woman Blog Fest – KM Huber's Blog

A Movement in the Making: Girl Boner®

Posted on March 5, 2018March 5, 2018 by KM Huber in Consciousness, Writing

I sense spring in the air and that means it’s time for August McLaughlin’s Beauty of a Woman BlogFest, now in its seventh year. Writers explore beauty in all its facets, rather like the flowering buds of spring, eternal and empowered.

If you do not know the work of August and Girl Boner you are missing a “movement in the making.” Her weekly Girl Boner podcasts are “where good girls go for sexual empowerment.” Here, everyone has a place at the table. Everyone. I don’t miss an episode.

Embracing our sexuality is essential

for embracing our full selves.

August McLaughlin

Girl Boner is a way to fully appreciate the sexuality of the human experience–any gender, any age. As a sexagenarian I am at home here, and yes, I learn so much. GB Radio takes me to a world of people I would not know otherwise.

It is easy to feel invisible, as an aging woman, and some days I do but being part of the GB movement means having a place to go where who I am is respected. I am visible, and what I have to say is still of worth. My alternative view of the world is welcomed right along with my wrinkles.

People, even more than things,

have to be restored, renewed, revived,

reclaimed, and redeemed;

Never throw out anybody.

Sam Levenson (“Beauty of a Woman”)

Such equanimity of experience–primal, raw beauty–fills me with hope and strengthens my resolve in supporting the generation of women now emerging on the world stage, a movement in the making.

Eagerly, I follow in support and often bring up the flank, sometimes because experience, a bit of history, is all that is needed, and sometimes because I am a cis-gender lesbian. In the GB world what I offer is valued.

That we have not yet found equanimity in gender, our sexuality, speaks volumes about our struggle to live with and within the beauty that is each of us. We don’t yet know to celebrate the life of every bloom.

There is security in safety, wrapped tightly within ourselves, but it is not living. Every spring, the desire to burst forth is greater than to stay tightly wound.

That is the beauty of a woman, to know every spring, the only opportunity she has ever needed.

We are either going to have a future

where women lead the way to

make peace with the Earth or

we are not going to have a human future at all.

Vandana Shiva

This post is part of The Beauty of a Woman BlogFest VII! To read more entries, and potentially win a fun prize, visit the fest page on August’s McLaughlin’s site between today and 11pm PST March 9th.

The Zen of Sexuality

Posted on March 6, 2017March 6, 2017 by KM Huber in Inspiration, Lupus, Writing

It’s been months since I have posted but I have not been inactive online, especially on Aim for Even.

My absence from this blog has been a time of change, of empowerment. And yes, that has meant a number of challenges.

Some of them seem to have an extended moment of existence. 😉

I continue to recover from two hip-joint replacement surgeries (one includes a fracture). Increasingly, I am active in #TheResistance; I’ve even had an essay published in an anthology.

The pain America is experiencing has parallels with chronic illness. After all, this country has ignored so much for so long. But that is a post for another day, in a week or two. 🙂

Today’s post celebrates August McLaughlin’s Beauty of a Woman Blog Fest, one of my favorite annual events. I believe this is my third year of participating.

Always, there are two categories, both requiring thoughtful discussion of beauty. There is the “original” beauty category and its array of possibilities. The second is Girl Boner®—my choice this year–specifically the Zen of sexuality, à la Girl Boner® radio podcasts.

I am a regular listener of these podcasts and have been since 2014. GB radio is “where good girls go for sexual empowerment,” and that is just the voyage in, “a movement in the making” as August has described it.

Imagine a world that does not look askance at sexuality or even asexuality but accepts that sexuality is not only part of being human, it is an essential part of the human experience. That is the world of Girl Boner® podcasts.

In Zen, we are here to experience what it is to be alive in the physical dimension–all that may encompass, including our sexuality.

Embracing our sexuality is essential

for embracing our full selves.

August McLaughlin

I hear that awareness and compassion in every GB radio podcast. Our innate sexuality is how we identify. For me that means lesbian and cis-gender female. There are others who identify similarly and many who do not.

I think it is as Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.” Sexuality is such memory, without language but never without inner knowledge.

In Zen, we open ourselves to all we meet— we open our doors with equanimity— so that we experience all that life reveals to us. Girl Boner® is a way to fully appreciate the sexuality of our own human experience. As well, it teaches us to embrace the experience we do not know.

There are few true resources for the transgendered population as well as those who are not cis-gender. The same is true for those who are asexual.

Girl Boner® broadens the scope of our understanding of the sexuality of being human. Truly, the work of August McLaughlin and Girl Boner® is a celebration of the Sam Levenson poem for which the BOAW Blog Fest is named:

People, even more than things,

have to be restored, renewed, revived,

reclaimed, and redeemed; Never throw out anybody.

Sam Levenson

No one. Not ever. Namaste.

This post is part of the Beauty of a Woman BlogFest VI! To read more entries, and potentially win a fun prize, visit the fest page on August McLaughlin’s site between today and 11pm PST March 11th.

Colors of the Day: the Beauty of Being

Posted on May 2, 2016May 5, 2016 by KM Huber in Inspiration, Reflections

August McLaughlin’s Beauty of a Woman Blog Fest V (#BOAW16) launches today. Both men and women bloggers offer unique perspectives on beauty.

To me, the fest is a celebration of the beauty of being, like walking through the doorway of equanimity to explore compassion, joy, and loving-kindness, the colors of our days.

Each day is a blank canvas, a textured, vibrant explosion of experience, beauty blurring and blending one expression into another. No facet of beauty is denied for that is not the nature of transformation.

Beauty does not reside in a single appearance. It does not live on a pedestal. No one sentient life is worthier than another. The faces of beauty reveal “destiny or fate or meaning, heroes of remarkable stories” (Rebecca Solnit).

Every sentient life is remarkable for it is the only version of that story that will ever be told.

Beauty is not found in a single expression but in every experience of existence in this dimension of sensation. Day after day, the multi-verse expresses itself anew.

It is the nature of beauty to renew rather than repeat or redo. No experience of beauty leaves us unchanged nor does it stay.

There are moments we would hold forever; others, we would avoid if we could. Try as we may, we are not allowed either of these choices.

The beauty of being transcends any framing of or confining to one day, one experience, or one moment. Nor does it exclude. Being is the blend and blur of the events of a lifetime.

We exist in a dimension of sensation, the beauty of being always on the horizon for as long as there are days to experience. In the dawn, we greet the colors of our day:

I am grateful for this day,

for every moment I experience

as a human being.

May I meet each moment

with equanimity, joy,

loving-kindness, and compassion

for all

in all ways, in all things.

I hope you visit Beauty of a Woman Fest V. It may change your life. ❤