Candace Avont: Goddess on the Rise

Was a scrawny girl. Boys didn't look my way. Wasn't down enough for the cool kids. But unwilling to conform to save face. English was broken. Clothes not baggy. Often the token. So they'd often laugh at me. Got to know God early. Prayed to be different. So, different He made me. Didn't notice any changes. Because my mind lacked clarity. Kept praying with sincerity. Became a student of myself. Eyes finally opened up to see I belonged on the top shelf. Gained confidence and certainty of who I was to be. Now grown men turn around to get another look at me. Not because I'm fine. But because of the glow. That comes from the connection I have to my soul. No one's laughing anymore. Only asking questions. What can I do to be more like you? So I start with the lessons. Rule number one, know thy self. If not, blind to everyone else. Wisdom seeker. Knowledge keeper. With my chin to the skies. Nothing more or less than a Goddess on the Rise.

Goddess Inspiration: Marian Wright Edelman

Marriage: Harmonious Union or Sacramental Sentence?

You’ve been dreaming about and planning for it since you were eight: your happily ever after. After rounds of revisions in your head, you finally settled on dark purple and gold as your colors to fit your royal-themed reception. Your ceremony would take place at a church with a single aisle and plenty of pews to accommodate all the guests you plan to invite. On your wedding day, you imagine being draped in the most beautiful white dress accompanied with the most fabulous up-do and make up as well as something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. Just before the ceremony starts, your bridesmaids will surround you and offer comfort as your nerves begin to unravel and your eyes threaten to tear.

Then the time comes. Your father will walk you slowly down the aisle showered with gold rose petals and lined with onlookers focused only on you and your beauty. And as you find your place at the altar, clearly marked by your wedding planner the night before, you’ll gaze into your beau’s eyes and begin imagining the rest of your life with him.

But what kind of life will that be?

Without a doubt, you hope your marriage lasts until death do you part and your lives together will be characterized by mutual respect, marked by joint effort, filled with more joy than pain and led by God. However, recent statistics about marriage and articles written on the subject leave a grim picture about whether happily ever after can realistically be achieved in our day. The Americans for Divorce Reform project that 40%-50% of marriages will end in divorce if the current trend continues.

In one of the best love stories written, Love in the Time of Cholera, marriage is described as, “against all scientific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves committed to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions. The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”

Quite an interesting perspective. The same elements required for a harmonious union are the very ones missing from a sacramental sentence. So, I’ll start with the latter using a real example that support the book’s perspective.

I have a friend who’s been married for less than one year, and while she should still be enjoying the honeymoon phase of her marriage, she instead spends many days and nights arguing, crying and being completely emotionally drained. So, what’s going wrong? My friend feels like her voice doesn’t count in the union. When she expresses her feelings to her husband, he gets defensive and becomes angered resulting in periods of silence that could last for week. To give you an example, she wanted her husband to decrease the amount of times that he and his female friend (that he’s been cool with since college) communicated. They talked through email, text message and phone several times per week. My friend felt disrespected and brought her feelings to the table. Unfortunately, they weren’t well received or considered, and he continued communicating with his female friend weekly. He viewed this request as giving up a friendship that started long before he and my friend started dating, and that was something that he wasn’t willing to do. This is one small example in the haystack of issues that my friend has come to me with, and after she explain each issue thoroughly, my mind draws the same conclusion: her husband has not yet made the transition from individual to married man.

And according to Andrew J. Cherlin, author of Marriage-Go-Round, this is a pretty common cause for divorce because Americans simultaneously hold two values at once: a culture of marriage and a culture of individualism. He calls it individualized marriage, where couples evaluate their satisfaction with marriage in terms of the development of their own sense of self and the expression of their feelings, as opposed to the satisfaction they gain through building a family and playing the roles of spouse and parent. In the article, The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage, Cherlin states that in an individualized marriage, each person aims to develop a fulfilling, independent self instead of sacrificing oneself to one’s partner.

Now, every story has two sides. But from what I’ve gathered from my friend, she is most interested in creating a companionate marriage while her husband is content with an individualized one. If the different views of the union continue, it seems as if my friend will simply be doing time in a sacramental sentence.

So, one ingredient necessary to cook up a harmonious union is undoubtedly similar views between two people on what a marriage should be. According to article What’s Love Got To Do With It, there are also other variables that can increase the odds of a harmonious union. The article includes results from a study that followed 2,500 couples for six years and reveals that husbands who marry after age 25 are twice as likely to stay married. Also, spouses both in their first marriage are 90 more likely to stay together than partners who are in their second or third marriage. The article mentioned financials, children, and marital state of spouses’ parents as other variables.

So what can couples do to prevent their marriage from becoming a sacramental sentence? The article 5 Things Super Happy Couples Do Every Day has some suggestions.
1. Make time to connect. Sit down and talk.
2. Remind each other that you’re sexy. Compliment each other. Talk sexy. Share fantasies.
3. Share a guilty pleasure. Do something silly. Watch a reality show together.
4. Enrich yourselves as individuals. Do some things separately to give yourselves time to miss each other.
5. Get spiritual together. Pray.

The minster will pronounce you man and wife. You’ll turn to make your way back down the aisle as a married woman and hope and pray to live happily ever after.

Goddess Inspiration: Gwendolyn Brooks

Goddess Zuri Sale: All Naugh-Tees for $15: Sale Ends Friday!!!!

*Sale Ends Friday!!!* For a limited time only, all Naugh-Tees are on sale for $15. Regular price $23-25. Don't miss out! Decide which one is right for you:

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Goddess Art: Made 4 Each Other

Made 4 Each Other by WAK

Beautiful.

I'll speak for all of my girlfriends when I say we want to marry men that God made and molded just for us. And we want the men we marry to think the same way.

Before we find this union, however, we'll likely have to weather a few unsuccessful relationships in order to grow and be prepared for the person that God has prepared for us.

We may experience frustration and temporary bitterness while dating. But those feelings will undoubted be replaced with overwhelming joy when the ones that were made for us (and us for them) come along.

Goddess Inspiration: Audre Lorde

45 Lessons of Life

My friend sent me an email forward from a 90 year old woman, Regina Brett, that included 45 lessons that life taught her. I loved them so much, I wanted to share them with you.

1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch, especially with your grandparents.
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.
8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.
12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; God never blinks.
16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.
18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.
19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.
21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.
23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.
24. The most important sex organ is the brain.
25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.
26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words 'In five years, will this matter?'
27. Always choose life.
28. Forgive everyone everything.
29. What other people think of you is none of your business.
30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.
31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
32. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
33. Believe in miracles.
34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.
35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
36. Growing old beats the alternative -- dying young.
37. Your children get only one childhood.
38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.
41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
42. The best is yet to come.
43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
44. Yield.
45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift."

Goddess Art: Proud Divas

Proud Divas
by Frank Morrison

Beyonce says that a "diva is a female version of a hustla."

Well, when I look at this picture, I definitely see two proud divas whose expressions say it all. Tell them that they aren't fly, and you'll likely to get "the look." Tell them they aren't sexy, and you'll likely to get cussed out. Tell them that they aren't strong, confident black women, and you'll likely to get slapped. Tell them that they aren't goddesses, and you'll likely get cut.

Ok, maybe they wouldn't go that far. But from the looks of it, you can't tell these women anything. Because they know who they are, and that's how we should be.

We should be so inwardly and outwardly confident with ourselves that people would be crazy to challenge what we know is true.

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Goddess Inspiration

Reclaim Your Health!

My girlfriend and I went to a party this weekend, and had so much fun. In between reggae music and dirty south tunes, we did what we do best: people watched. We saw the usual, dudes trying to seem more important than they really were and girls trying to catch the gaze of those very dudes. But I also noticed and observed something a little different this time. More than a few of the black women in the room were overweight. Not just a few pounds overweight, or a little bulge here and there, but undeniably overweight!

I’ll be the first to tell you that I am far from perfect, but one thing I care about and give a lot of attention to is the health of my body. The desire to stay fit and healthy started pretty early for me. As a little girl, I was the nagging little sister that would chase my brother and his friends around the neighborhood, begging to play sports and games with them. I eventually left him alone, and I started running track and lifting weights in the eighth grade. I ran and weight trained throughout my high school and college days, so I developed a habit that was pretty easy to maintain in the first few years after I graduated.

Even after life got busy through job changes, city changes, friendship changes, and whatever else, I still made time to run or walk or treadmill. Staying active has helped me maintain the same size for over 12 years. Now, I understand that my lifestyle may not be the norm and that everybody wasn’t an athlete in high school and college. I get that, so I’ll use my friends as examples to make my point.

I have a friend who doesn’t do anything much else than work. Even in college, this girl studied from sun up to sun down leaving very little time for fun. But over the years, she gained more and more awareness of how important it was to take care of her body. She knew that she could never imagine going to a gym, though, spending hours working out on equipment she really didn’t know how to use and sweating out her perm. So, she took up pole dancing instead. Yes, pole dancing! Although it sounds scandalous, pole dancing is a great great way to build core and upper body strength. So, pole dancing is her thing and serves as her form of exercise. She has taken classes at a local studio for some time, but recently went a little further and had a pole installed in her home! This allows her to workout in the morning, when she gets home from work, before going to bed or whenever else she wants to.

I have another friend who doesn’t necessarily like gyms or dedicating extra time in her schedule to working out. So, she asked herself how she could incorporate exercise into some of the hours in her day that had already been allocated to other things, like work or errands. She decided that she would use her one hour lunch break to walk around her office building. So, she began taking her sneakers and shorts to work each day and six months later she was 30 pounds lighter. Of course, she coupled exercise with eating healthy.

I’ll mention that none of us have kids or a husband to rush home to and feed. But we do have busy careers, parttime businesses, hobbies, classes and other side hustles that occupy our time.

Now for the statistics….according to the Office of Minority Health, Black women have the highest rates of being overweight or obese compared to other groups in the U.S. About four out of five Black women are overweight or obese. And according to womenshealth.gov, being overweight or obese increases your risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, breathing problems, arthritis, gallbladder disease, sleep appnea (breathing problems while sleeping), osteoarthritis, and some cancers.

These statistics alone should be enough for us to kick it into gear and began a weekly exercise routine. But I know that life happens and sometimes gets in the way, so it’s important for us to figure out how to incorporate exercising into our already busy day. Try a pole dancing class twice a week, walking during your lunch break, climbing stairs at least four times a day, doing 50 sit ups each night before going to bed or turning on your favorite cd and dancing in front of the mirror. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you are being active.

You don’t have to be a size 4 to be healthy. In fact, being big and healthy is one thing. Just being big is quite another. Goddesses, the time is now to reclaim your health!