Hello Lovely,
Happy International Women’s Day!
… which in Truth is every day ending in ‘y.’
At KYPRIS, women are at the center of our story. From our namesake, Kypris, the divinely feminine fertility goddess, to our female founder and leader, Chase, to our team which is almost entirely all women, many of whom are mothers and aunts, to the farms and labs and chemists and wildcrafting groups and co-ops we patronize to create our offerings, we have made the celebration of women and our unique journey of care and sumptuous Beauty the heart of all we do.
Today we celebrate all the women who surround and inspire us: our mothers, our aunts, our daughters, our sisters, our friends, and the women we admire throughout history. Let us also celebrate the divine feminine in each of us. Our stories wealthy in strength and tenderness, complication and beauty, flaws and the exquisite, Love and misunderstanding.
Persistent currents of the overcultures – global, national, communal, familial, and more – weave an impersonal tapestry of demands and expectations about who and how we are supposed to be as women at every stage of our lives. Yet, the freedom of self determination is a human right.
When women are empowered, we are credited with growing economies, stabilizing communities, birthing our future generations, and so much more. Women do all manner of unrecognized work and service caring for their families and communities.
And yet globally, women’s freedom and wellbeing are undermined. From the 34 bills introduced to the US legislation attempting to undermine women’s freedoms and access to health care in 2018 to Boko Haram kidnapping young women from school to the over 40 million victims of human trafficking each year globally, 75% of whom are women and girls, to the ubiquitous and pervasive ghostly fingerprints of everything guilting us, or worse, shaming us for looking, being, seeming, sounding, existing a certain way or not.
The oppression and the inequality are insane.
And literally everyone – men and women – of all ages and colors – suffer because of it in ways apparent and insidious. Moreover, those of minorities have even more complicated challenges weighed upon them.
And so you ask, what does this have to do with Beauty?
Everything.
For women in too many places including the US and other western countries, existing is a revolutionary act. There are people beaten, shot, stoned, flogged, murdered for simply existing. Both in our backyard and half way around the world. The problem is global.
Existing with self possession and pride and a sense of personal delight is an act of sedition. One we highly recommend. For those of us who can, let’s please normalize it.
In the face of all of these undue influences, we are best served by a daily practice of care and connection that returns each of us to ourselves. So we can hear ourselves feel and think. So we can recenter on our personal sense of pleasure being embodied as only we are. So we can delight in our divinely unique humanity.
So we remember our shape and character free from anyone else’s intrusive expectations of how we should inhabit this gorgeous life as anyone or anything but our glowing gorgeous selves.
At KYPRIS, we believe Beauty is a vital spiritual experience of Love, acceptance, care, and pleasure.
Only we can bestow ourselves with the gift of permission to revel in our Being. To decide what Beauty feels like in our body and to carry this joy into the world for our pleasure only.
So today and every day, we invite you to savor the sweet fruits of your divinely unique Beauty.
To recognize that in doing so you honor yourself, those women who so greatly sacrificed before us so we might enjoy our increasing freedoms, the wonderful men who love us and let us love them, and the billions of
our sisters who have risked and risk their lives planting such exotic, too-rare seeds.
With Love, Potency, & the Sweet Fruits of an Exotic Tree,
Your KYPRIS Family
