Being Seen and Being Ignored

So you may have seen this video that's doing the rounds of a young woman walking the streets of New York City.  The director has a camera in his backpack, and as they record 10 hours of walking (wow, tired feet?), there are over 100 instances of her being spoken to by men on the street.  Or spoken at, it probably feels more like.

I tuned into the contradictory feelings and thoughts that welled up in me on watching this video.  One part of me was really pissed off that this woman not only couldn't walk the streets without feeling harassed.  She also couldn't walk the streets and be able to forget herself. Beautiful? Mindful of the narcissism that engenders in this beauty obsessed cultured?  Want to get out, walk, lose yourself in that beautiful way that creates a nice little dose of mental health? Well, don't expect any respite when you leave your door because you're not going to be able to forget it for long.  'Cause those curves of yours, they make you belong to everyone else, baby.

The contradictory and jealous part of me (she's a pretty girl and I'm getting older) is a little jealous of all that attention.

But then what comes after that?  What gets left for women AFTER this kind of thing STOPS is a silence. But it's not a nice silence. It's a heavy silence full of condemnation. Because while you might have hated the attention before, on one level it made you feel good (the level that wasn't intimidated and harassed) because it's exciting to be admired and to be found attractive.

The dead zone after that confusing space is a reminder, once again, that you are on the other side of the beauty barrel. It's a reminder, from the cradle to the grave, that you are always going to be judged on how attractive you are.  Whether you've got it or you ain't, you won't be able to forget that the outside of you is seen, or ignored, and that it will make it so much harder for you to bring forth what is inside because of that.

I think that's why some women who wear burqas claim that they give them a certain amount of freedom.  Seen from this perspective, you can understand a little of what they might be getting at.

The Tardis

It's not so much a space where you've

put aside your reason and rationality and

entered into a world made stupid because

it's subjective.

~

It's more something like

entering into a story that

is alive

where you are a character

within your own telling

a dream within a dream

knowing the world through

the soles of your very own feet.

~

Pic by Eneas de Troya under a CC attribution licence

Making Money Beautiful

Suppose I have twelve loaves of bread, and you are hungry.  I cannot eat so much bread before it goes stale, so I am happy to lend some of it to you.  "Here, take these six loaves," I say, "and when you have bread in the future, you can give me six loaves back again."  I give you six fresh loaves now, and you give me six fresh loaves sometime in the future.

In a world where the things we need and use go bad, sharing comes naturally.  The hoarder ends up sitting atop a pile of stale bread, rusty tools, and spoiled fruit, and no one wants to help him, for he has helped no one.  Money today, however, is not like bread, fruit, or indeed any natural object.  It is the lone exception to nature's laws of return, the law of life, death, and rebirth, which says that all things ultimately return to their source.  Money does not decay over time, but in its abstraction from physicality, it remains changeless or even grows with time, exponentially, thanks to the power of interest.

We associate money very closely with self.  As the word "mine" implies, we see our money almost as an extension of our selves, which is why we feel "ripped off" when it is taken from us.  Money, then, violates not only the natural law of return, but the spiritual law of impermanence.  Associating something that persists and grows over time with a self that ages, dies, and returns to the soil perpetuates an illusion.  Though we all know better, we imagine somehow that by adding wealth we add to ourselves and can gain the imperishability of money.  We store it up for old age, as if we could thereby forestall our own decay.  What would be the effect of money that, like all other things, decays and returns to its source?

We have attached an exponentially growing money to a self and world that are neither exponential nor even linear, but cyclic.  The result, as I have described, is competition, scarcity, and the concentration of wealth.  The answer to the question I posed earlier, "What has gone wrong with this beautiful idea called money, which can connect human gifts and human needs?" comes down in large part to interest, to usury.  But usury itself is not some isolated phenomenon that could have been different if only we'd made a wiser choice somewhere down the line.  It is irrefrangibly bound to our sense of self, the separate self in an objective universe, whose evolution parallels the evolution of money.  It is no accident that the first highly monetized society, ancient Greece, was also the birthplace of the modern concept of the individual.

This deep link between money and being is good news, because human identity today is undergoing a profound metamorphosis.  What kind of money will be consistent with the new self, the connected self, and a world in which we increasingly realize the truth of interconnectedness:  that more for you is more for me?  Given the determining role of interest, the first alternative currency system to consider is one that structurally eliminates it, or even that bears interest's opposite.  After all, if interest causes competition, scarcity and polarization, then might not its opposite create cooperation, abundance, and community?  And if interest represents the proceeds from the ancient and ongoing robbery of the commons, might not its opposite replenish it?

What would that opposite look like?  It would be a money that, like bread, becomes less valuable over time.  It would be money, in other words, that decays ...

~ Charles Eisenstein, who explains how in Sacred Economics, available as a download here for free, or for a price of your choice.

Public domain

Despair and Bliss

Do not, when people tell you they are depressed and wish to die, regale them with reasons why the world is so beautiful that it is simply wrong for them to think that way.  It is true that the world is so beautiful, but the world is also brutal, nasty and despairingly flawed.  Try to resist propelling any repulsion you feel outwards but instead remember that you too will one day die, and that unless you are extremely lucky you too will one day feel this way.

If you tell them that they must stop feeling this way, it denies the black moon beauty that is found even within those spaces where we wish to be no more.  It denies the golden thread that runs through everything.  Leonard Cohen's crack runs very deep, right to the core.

:P

Which is a tragedy, and an opportunity for Kelvin Cunnington, and also a fine, fine beauty.  Depending on what world you find yourself in.

The world to you bares her beauty.  You roll in her mists, and so you should.  The world to them is a differently made-up composition of chemicals and genetic mutations that make what you are saying not just a farce, but the fact that you would deny their experience to their face a slap and a travesty.

Stand Alone Complex by =Lucid-Light

When people tell you they are depressed and wish to die, take the beauty that you swim in in the world and try and creatively package it.  Not a mass-produced item, but instead take her moonlight and her sun and if you can, help them find out what it is that they love, what it is that they crave, what it is that they need so badly that it has pulled itself completely inside out and become its own opposite.  And if you can at all possibly do it, package it up into something just for them, and give it to them.  You may not be able to.  But if you can, do not expect the sort of response that you would receive if they were bathed themselves in moonlight.

You cannot fix anybody at all.  But you can accept them.  Acceptance of them may just help in some very small way for them to find acceptance of their own in being in this space, to see the deep beauty that exists even here. 

It is a paradox that making yourself at home in any space helps you to stop embedding yourself so hard into it, and might help you, in whatever way is required and possible in your situation, to begin the climb out again.

The More Beautiful World ...

... our heart knows is possible.

Just "at the edge of your courage, but not past it."

The Inside Moves

It's hot tonight.  Hotter overnight temperatures than most of my Northern Hemispherean friends will see at the height of their day that is beginning as mine is ending.  My old but working air conditioner chugs coldness out into my darkened lounge room.  It is a sheet and no doona night.

We move toward the solstice in less than a week.

I am greedy for the light.  So greedy that the approach of the solstice fills me with sadness because it is downhill from here.  If that's not the voice of a seasonally affectively disordered person, I don't know what is.  The desperate grab of addiction, there never being enough light.  Bemoaning the downward dip.  As if the light is suddenly going to start dipping out of the sky at 5pm by next Friday :)

I love the way things go.  The way the seasons blend.  The grace that is held within the steady downward sweep of light into dark and then back into light again.  I keep looking around at older women.  I am fascinated by older women.  We see the downward sweep from light collagen to dark death but we do not often think that there is light collagen out the other side of the door.  Our culture has taught that it is life/death but that is simply not true.  Everything around us has life after its death.  And yet that is not something that can be proven scientifically, or rationally.  But right down to the very cells within me, which have all renewed themselves several times over before my own physical death happens, I feel that this is true even with us, even with everything.

My friend Jane and I sat on the weekend talking about how gravity and ageing brings you up against issues that in your twenties you thought you would never contemplate.  Boob jobs and botoxing and dying grey hairs.  And yet we are both resolute that we shall age as gracefully as we can.

And anyway, we talked about true beauty being that which shines from within.  That is so cliched as to sound really poxily wanky.  The reality of that inner beauty is something much more mercurial, delicious.  But it probably wouldn't even be called beauty even though it seems to be the absolute essence of what beauty is.  The outward facade of attractive and beautiful people is a smaller version of it but we have made it everything.  So it doesn't seem all that strange to me therefore that in our society even young, beautiful girls are looking more and more overdone.  (Or perhaps I am just getting old :)  But there is so often a harshness about beautiful girls and women whose beauty would be so much more awesome if it wasn't ramped and trashed up. 

The beauty that comes from within bubbles.  I saw my friend Ed in the health food shop on Monday.  I have known Ed for quite a few years now and he has helped me immensely find my way back to some semblance of good health after having CFS for so long.  We have the most wonderful conversations.  We talk spiritual matters.  He tells me where he's been at and what he's seeing.  Like the free Living Now magazine that graces the stand underneath his counter, some of Ed's ideas have veered toward the more fruit loopy of New Age ideas.  And yet, even within that, we always - always - find room to be able to swim in the Isness of Truth together, despite how differently we are seeing.

It's some sort of grace.


I had had a pretty strange last several days, all told.  They saw me up all night on Friday night with an infection and then saw me in a delirium of courage on Saturday afternoon, after two hours' sleep, scaling the wall of prayer and meditation into wishing someone well who had bewildered me, out of a situation where I felt so much hurt and confusion and rejection.  Part of that whole scenario is the reason for this blog move.  I do not want him to read my words, as he has so avidly done every single day for the past two years, if he does not want me in his real life.  Enough said about that.

Where was I?  Yes, Ed and Monday afternoon.  When I go and visit Ed in his health food shop it's always a long enterprise.  We have so much to catch up on and share about and the customers coming into the shop needing help for their health issues mean that for long periods of time I walk about the shop trying not to buy anything else.  On Monday I sat on the comfortable cushioned wicker chair and sort of meditated, eyes open.  I was feeling truly blissed out even within the midst of this grief and this health issue that was still stealing my sleep.  I cannot really explain it except to say that that wall I had climbed over on Saturday afternoon of "may the best outcome win" and letting everything go just sent me off into this bliss where I just felt like what I didn't have I didn't need it now, and that my life held as much promise and prospect and wonder in its future as I could open my arms to.  It has been the most wonderful sort of a comfort.

Ed has moved on now to A Course in Miracles and was enjoying, inbetween customers, telling me about the Holy Spirit and Jesus and how it's all about forgiveness.  It was funny hearing Ed talk about Jesus but it was good (it was an advance on last time we talked where Jesus was a load of hokum invented by someone in the fifteenth century.  I have no need whatsoever to convince Ed about anything.  I have no hesitation in saying what I believe.  It is a rich field, and beautiful).  We talked about forgiveness and how you fall into it and how it's everything and at the end of our talking we both had tears in our eyes, and it is true.  It's all about being as empty-handed as you can, of loving each other.  It's very, very simple indeed.

"Look at you, you are just glowing!" Ed sad in wonderment to me, which was hilarious because I felt fucking awful.  But that is grace too.

Because beauty is really not about how you look.  Not ultimately.  We have all had the experience of seeing a person who is not particularly good looking but who manages to have all eyes in the room upon them.  There is a grace about them a confidence.  It is some sort of inner beauty.

And right now, I feel beautiful.  When I live in this space, I am 25 years old.  It will never, ever fade.

Woman and Unreachable Standards: Airbrushing as Business Imperative

Pic: Sarah Murdoch on the latest Womens Weekly cover.

The Australian Women's Weekly has run its latest issue with a non-airbrushed cover shot of Sarah Murdoch, model and daughter-in-law of His Antichristness, Rupert (how on earth did such a man come out of a dudey gal like Iris, but I digress).

Hooray for some sense and guts to come from someone appearing on a magazine cover. Sarah asked for her shot to not be airbrushed. As she said in this interview from the ABC site:

I think when I'm retouched in photographs it's worse, because when people see me in real life they go, 'Oh God, isn't she old?' ... It makes me mad that we can't embrace the beauty of ageing, because we're all going to do it.

Yeah. Like, duh. Good stuff, Sarah. Awesomeness.

The Weekly's editor, Helen McCabe, when asked if they will do it again said:

There are real business imperatives why magazines have gone this way. It's a very competitive industry and I'm - at this stage - just taking a little baby step and seeing how this goes for now.

I am planning on buying a copy of the Weekly. I'm hoping it becomes a business imperative to NOT airbrush women. It's disgusting and pretty much immoral, and also dehumanising for women to constantly have portrayed at them unattainable beauty that doesn't even exist.

Nothing is done if profit cannot be achieved in the small, small business world we now live in. But oh, how cool if this was to become a standard.

Yes. And yes. And yes. And yes.

Saw this over at Cheryl's place today at Hold This Space, and just HAD to repost in its entirety.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

‘The dichotomy between beauty and necessity has always been a false tension. Yet as a distraction, it has been extremely effective at crippling our power to bring full-bodied, earth-rending change. And those of us who are most intent on justice, those of us who are activists, and those of us who stand in the barrage of steady societal critique perhaps need to drink in more art than anyone else. In our line of work, the task of stoking our vision and constantly imagining possibilities is absolutely essential.

We can be so harsh and ascetic as we fling ourselves against the needs of the world. Art is accused of being bourgeois because much of the creation of art takes time and solitude and staring out the window. And how can we give ourselves permission to do that when people are starving and there is work to be done?

I think of Judas bemoaning the fragrant ointment that could have been sold to feed hundreds of hungry people but instead is poured in that single lavish, revolutionary gesture onto the head of Jesus. He views the profligate gesture as sin, and feeding the poor as the only good.

I know that voice. it comes from my own lips. But if we always see only those who are starving, we will continually wander the desert of the frantically working and overwhelmed. What we need - desperately - is to not be overwhelmed. And the single thing that keeps us from being overwhelmed is imagination…’

- taken from ‘How one justice-seeker was redeemed by beauty’, Dee Dee Risher, in Geez Magazine Spring ‘08 edition.

On latex and botox

Been pondering a bit more about the human body, after my mini nervous breakdown this week. Pondering how it is interesting that we get to live our lives in a visible encasement, each different than the other, dealt out in rather unegalitarian fashion, some beautiful, some ugly. And about culture, and the ways Christian cultures especially teach inadvertently that our bodies are bad. (Magpie Girl has a really interesting post today about why she is not teaching her kids the abstinence route. Thought provoking whether you agree with her conclusions or not).

Been pondering the media-and-advertising-driven obsession with our bodies, with the outward appearance. As evidenced by my posts this week, this is something I buy into and feed into whether I like it or not. I hate that I am affected at all by such inherent superficialities. I hate the focus for women on beauty. I hate it because I know that ultimately, boiling it down and painting with broad strokes, what it comes down to, whether women will admit it or not, is power. Women want to be gorgeous because it affords us a superiority, a haughty-eyed buffer between ourselves and others, an interesting mesh of having a tool that keeps people at a distance, draws them close, and keeps them dangling on a string. This ridiculous over-focus has been criticised as vanity in the past. But our culture loves it, encourages it. But the machine munches women up in the process, steals our strength, steals our self-worth, steals our bodies. Steals the things that belong to us.

Been pondering how it is that we can be so out of connection with our surroundings. Was lying in bed this morning thanking God for my latex mattress. I know, strange prayer, but you know :) I love my latex mattress. It cost a pretty penny but will last me for 25 years and it's supportive and doesn't allow dust mites to collect in it, and I like it, you know? We have been sleeping together for over a year now, and he's very supportive. (I haven't named him yet, but I might :) So anyway, I was thanking God for my latex mattress and then I went off into a rambling digression in my head about how I didn't know where the rubber that went into the making of this mattress came from, what country. I didn't know how many people harvested the rubber, or how the mattress was made. Then I thought about the different types of mattresses that people have slept on over the years and centuries (I know, I think a lot), and how it is that even though I love my latex mattress and it is more chiropractically supportive and comfortable than, say, a mattress made of hay, the person that slept on a hay-filled mattress had a connection to that mattress that I will never have with mine.

Often there would have been a physical connection, if they had stuffed their mattress themselves. Or at the very least, there would be a connection because they knew where their mattress had come from and where the filling had come from and who had stuffed it. I'm not thinking so much here about the environmental impact, the footprint involved in the making of my own latex mattress, the shipping from another country and the like. I'm thinking here in a more hippy mystical way about the connections that go on between the objects our bodies come into contact with every day, about how knowing the history of an object allows you to somehow enter deeper into that object, and how knowing that object in your own personal way means that you come to see that object in a different way than someone who just happens upon it. You can see the dark and light and the cracks and warps and the underlying inherent beauty that only comes with the passing of time. It's the kitchen table that you bought locally 20 years ago that might appear ugly to others because of the deep scars or blotches in it, but each blotch for you is a reminder of the early years of your kids and their meetings with scissors and other sundry ruinable items.

I've had varying periods in my life where I have felt attractive. Mine is the quirky Bette Midler variety, the kind of face that covers an interesting terrain depending on what expression is passing across it at the time (oh, I have a photo of myself I want to post here someday, if the friends who are also featured don't mind, where I was purposefully making a face that actually scares even me when I look at it. It betrays all known scientific laws. Man, it is so ugly, it makes me laugh). You can only make yourself ugly, I guess, when you feel secure enough to do so. I'm not so sure I would be making that face at the moment :) My little mini nervous breakdown this week has been informed by that ugly, hard little pocket of unacceptance that still lives in me (hopefully somewhat depleted after this week, one can hope). I know where that pocket has come from and who informed it, many years previous. It is a strange experience, having the human brain that I do, that I can observe that hard little pocket, note its shape and its size somewhat, and yet my awareness of it doesn't diminish it (well, it's the beginning of its diminishment, of course, but aren't we somehow surprised that shining the light of our own observance doesn't just blow it out of the water, but it's a much longer process than that and involves one Other than me).

I met a most interesting woman recently, an artist of the easel as well as an artist of her own life. Making something beautiful out of the everyday, she does, with great regularity. Sees what isn't and walks into it as though it is. A life of faith and creativity. I don't know if she believes in God or not but she walks in his lands regularly. I could see this from being with her for an hour. There was a photo on the kitchen sideboard of her and her husband, both laughing. It was the most beautiful photo. She's of average looks. It didn't matter. She knows how beautiful she is.

She is not a commodity. I am not a commodity. Neither are you. Perhaps the most beautiful women of all are the ones who know and understand this, who have come to terms with themselves, with who they are, what they have to offer, the seeds of themselves that live in them that need to sprout. They are beautifully free.

Ordinary People

I sat on the train this morning, observed from behind my book the peoples (how interesting we are), the beauty in the ordinariness of people. The different shapes and colours of a disparate bunch of people of whom I was in the minority with my white skin. Arabs, undeodorised Indians, Asians. Breathed in the aroma of the ordinary. Looking at the people, the mob, mainly gazing unseeing or despondent out the window of one of the richest countries in the world, and thought, "You have the seeds of yourself within yourself, and they are more beautiful than you could have imagined" (well, I didn't really think that then. I rather felt it, but I think it now and write it so that thee, dear reader, can understand some of what I was feeling seeing there are no widgets I know of to stick 'this is how I felt' patterns on the sidebar of my blog. But here, have a fractal, instead. (A terribly slowly loading fractal, at least here on Samantha. It didn't take this long to load into my head, I must say, even in the morning). This is some kind of ballpark representation of how I felt when I looked at the ordinary people and thought, God loves them and some/most/all of them don't have any idea what that means.

None of us know. We really don't. Maybe dogs know, but even if they do, they don't know they know :) But one day we'll know.

And then Flagstaff Station loomed and yea, I stopped thinking philosophy and went to Capitalist Hell. Light and dark. Deep and dull.

Nobody is happy with how they look and most sit wonky near the edges of their skin, not centred within themselves, with their imperfection. And yet, if we could see the divine in each other we would fall at each other's feet, kiss the hands of lepers. No matter how gorgeous or ugly they or we are.

Sink into my heart, ponderings. Sink in :)