What Women Want

February 11, 2013 — 2 Comments

Reading Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting yesterday, I came across the story of Sir Gawain and the Loathely Lady. The authors’ retelling of the story shortens it and softens its rough medieval edges, focusing on the answer to its central question: what do all women really want?

If you have a few minutes, I suggest reading this translation of the story before coming back to this post. Spoilers follow this paragraph, and it’s a fun story to read before listening to further discussion of it. Especially this week, with Valentine’s Day coming up, I invite you to enjoy a romance that is decidedly of a different time and place! (Why do I suggest this particular translation? Because it appeared to be the most authentic translation of the original story that came up on the first page of Google results. Yes, thank you, I am such a scholar.)

In the story of Sir Gawain and the Loathely Lady (aka Dame Ragnell), we learn that what all women really want is sovereignty. When I read this story in Everyday Blessings, I thought for a minute that it couldn’t be an actual King Arthur story, spouting modern ideas like this one!

But reading the translation of the original, I see that “sovereignty” is treated more as “in charge of everything” than as “the right to rule oneself.” So that it may be more about the classic battle of the sexes, and the notion that in any relationship between two people, someone must always be in charge.

But, defining sovereignty as “the right to rule oneself,” I think this is a fitting answer to the question, and I might clarify further that women – just like men, just like politically-defined nations – want their sovereignty recognized, not bestowed (because it is no one else’s to bestow).

Or, as Mary Pipher writes in Reviving Ophelia (quoted in Everyday Blessings), though women all have different wants, each woman wants to be “the subject of her life and not [merely] the object of others’ lives.”

You Are. Now Eat.

January 29, 2013 — 8 Comments

This morning I crawled out from under my rock and learned about thinspo. Sometimes there is absolutely no fun involved in a loss of innocence. This was one of those times.

I first heard the term “thinspo” last week on a podcast. Yes, really. Just last week. I googled the term today and glimpsed an Internet subculture that shocked and saddened me. There really are women who publicly, matter-of-factly, and completely reject their fully-functional, highly complex human bodies, because they are “fat.” There appears to be no self-pity in this, no seeking of a “there-there, I love you just the way you are” virtual hug from anyone.

The images and pep-phrases of thinspo (“thinspiration” – think “successories” for weight-loss fanatics) strike me as stoic rally cries for soldiers going to battle. The war is for acceptance in a cruel world that has no place for cellulite. These soldiers seem to be past making value judgments, as any effective soldiers are. They purse their lips and accept hard reality, willing to fight to the death for a place in this wretched culture rather than live oppressed and kicked around any longer.

Just over a year ago, I stepped on a scale and faced a new tens digit – one I had only seen between my feet before when I was pregnant. I looked up my height, weight and frame size on a BMI chart and discovered I was overweight. So I decided to change direction. Over the last year I lost twenty pounds and gained new strength as I began running regularly and started eating mostly whole, plant-based foods.

Blah-blah-blah. If keeping my mouth shut about my success would in any way encourage a thinspo soldier to open hers and eat something substantial, I’d do it.

But maybe the best thing is to talk honestly about it. Yes, I moved the needle on the scale. Yes, I dropped a couple jeans sizes. Heck, I even have some defined abs to show for my regular core-muscle workouts.

But the only way an image of my body would make it into thinspo would be as reverse-thinspo, images of not-thin-enough bodies to inspire the thinspo soldier to keep that mouth firmly clamped except for the occasional diet soda and iceberg lettuce.

The thinspo ideal is not the human body at its best. It is a matter-denouncing self-loathing shroud.

I met my weight-loss goal, and I did it because I wanted to, when and how – and if – I wanted to. Now I run and eat well because it’s my habit, my lifestyle, and one of my life’s pure joys. Not my means to salvation from a hateful body-self.

A thinspo soldier doesn’t know or care what she wants. She can’t do her soul-crushing job with any effectiveness unless she shuts her mouth – not only to food but also to her own voice.

My body is amazing, and so is yours. I’ve routinely listened to negative self-talk that tells me otherwise – in my case, that my breasts are too small and my thighs are too large. But what does that even mean? What is “too small” and what is “too large?” My breasts functioned flawlessly in feeding both my babies. My thighs have never failed to support my body and move it from place to place.

That’s not to exclude those with dysfunctional breasts or thighs from the statement that your body is amazing. The fact that you are here at all, breathing air, thinking thoughts (or not), pumping blood through miles of tubing, experiencing life as only you – only you of anyone else who has ever lived – can experience it: that is amazing.

Whatever else we are, you and I are embodied beings. Enfleshed. Incarnate. We must learn to live in peace with and within our bodies. Yoda had it so right and a little bit wrong when he said,

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. . . . Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

I beg to differ, honorable Green One. Luminous beings are we, alive through this amazing matter.

I’m including no links to thinspo material in this post. That’s because I know that images and catch-phrases are powerful, and our culture already screams at women, all day long, that they are not thin enough, small enough, weak and insubstantial enough. So if you choose to “go there,” view thinspo’s brutal additions to the daily stream of attacks at your own risk.

And let’s all think twice about how and why we pursue health and beauty, and how we talk about that with each other. There are too many young women of inestimable worth on the brink of enlisting in thinspo’s ranks, and our careless words can give voice to the lies that recruit them.

Abraham

January 22, 2013 — 2 Comments

The following poem is reprinted with permission from the author.

Abraham
by Jason Mills

This is what you’ll do, your will decreed,
And I took him up the mountain, raised the blade,
Trusting that the slaughter met some need
Beyond the grasp of creatures you had made,
Proof of faith, if proof were not profane,
That chooses in submission to be blind,
Compelled to make these offerings of pain,
Refusing to believe them undesigned.

Yet not for you, to whom all things are known,
Who stayed my hand in sorrow more than joy;
I it was who needed to be shown
My eagerness to sacrifice the boy.
The falling axe made all mankind anew.
You wept, and whispered, This is what you’ll do.


You can find more of Jason’s work at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/jasonatvitalspotdotf9dotcodotuk. He tells me he hasn’t “squeezed out enough poetry to be worth binding,” but hopefully for the world’s sake that will change! (I came across his work through Goodreads’ poetry group.)

Is That Me On Your Universe’s Big Screen?

January 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

Experienced creators know that they are not fully in control of their creations. The general consensus I hear from novelists is that their characters are real, and the writer’s job is to tell a true story, in which the characters act consistently with their own personalities.

I know something about this from the work of writing songs. My best work has directed me in its own making – drawing me forward to the place where it already exists (David Wilcox talked like this at a house concert I attended once, and I knew precisely what he meant . . . uh, more or less).

As I was falling asleep the other night, I dreamily wondered if I am a character in the story that is the cosmos in which I exist; and if whatever we call God is the creator of this story.

Ideas are the center of reality, says Jim Holt in Radiolab’s recent podcast “Solid as a Rock.” My romantic religious heart swells to this notion.

In my little mind, art and science and religion gracefully fuse in the postulation of string theory – a place where multiple dimensions, even multiple universes, are accepted as highly plausible. I envision a universe where the Doctor really is flying around in his TARDIS, simply because people from my universe have created him. And of course I speculate about the artists who have created my world. Am I a character in another universe’s movie?

Don’t fret about my addled brain. I’m currently reading Lee Smolin’s book The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. I’ve only just begun Smolin’s book, but it promises to be a push-back against the academic community’s enthusiasm over string theory. Perhaps he will bring balance to the force.

(Although it is sad to think that there may not actually be any Skywalkers out there, anywhere . . .)

North Wind Speaks

January 15, 2013 — 1 Comment

This morning I surrendered my songwriting time to read to my daughter who is home sick from school. We finished George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, and I thought this statement from the character North Wind worth sharing:

Everything, dreaming and all, has got a soul in it, or else it’s worth nothing, and we don’t care a bit about it. Some of our thoughts are worth nothing, because they’ve got no soul in them. The brain puts them into the mind, not the mind into the brain.

At the Back of the North Wind is in the public domain and you can read or download it free at the following places:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/225

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0083ZC78C/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=1475238347&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1JC7EWAKE6HS9MVNWXJM