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Amplitude
At my home the other day a close friend commented about one of my self-portrait photos. She’d seen it many times before and thinks that it’s beautiful and complex. She comes over often, so we hardly talk about the piece every time. “Your eyes look sad” in the photo, she told me, “like you’ve just been crying or are about to cry.” I responded that I’d never seen the sadness and hadn’t intended it during the photo shoot. I saw a number of different expressions in the pictures from which the photographer and I selected for reproduction and exhibition only the one that, through the perception of my friend, I was seeing anew. Interpreting the photo’s iconography along with the emotional tone, she added, “You seem to be looking at someone who hurt you deeply, who betrayed you.”
Thinking more/thinking less
A sign in a shop window reads “Pray less. Think more.” Seeing it on Tucson’s 4th Avenue, a commercial street in a socially and politically liberal neighborhood, has me imagining that the dual directive is an anti-fundamentalist or -evangelist corrective, perhaps to a sign or bumper sticker that reads “Pray more. Think less.” If my supposition is true, then praying less and thinking more offers itself as a solution to people’s self-serving, egotistic, and mindless–or simple-minded–requests of a deity.
“Pray less. Think more” implicitly defines thinking as rational–sensible, reasoned, and analytical–and implicitly assumes that reason produces good outcomes. However, thinking defined differently, as in “You think too much,” is obsessive and unproductive. Or, “You think too much” can operate as an anti-intellectual’s trashing of an intellectual, if we define an intellectual as a mentally active person.
Being a scholar and having had a career in academia, my impression is that intellectuals tend to believe that thinking, the rational kind, presents facts accurately and leads to considered opinions and calm deliberation. Consequently, thinking is the best and most realistic way to solve problems. Reasoning is surely better than beating up people or yelling at them. Yet, reasoning, because it’s a human activity, has the human quality of being reactive, even when used by someone who can critique her own positions and arguments, because everyone is subject to their own persuasions, whether we call them biases, ideologies, or just likes and dislikes. Persuasions can be hidden to oneself or so embarrassingly glaring and incriminating to ourselves that we are ashamed to own up to them. Reactivity indicates imbalance. Thus, the supposed balanced nature of reasoned argument falters. Read more
- June 11, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind
- Comments 0
Practical fairy tales: Mr. Carrot
Once upon a time in this big wide world a beautiful princess, or 500,000 of them, fell in love (or just flat on the face). Fell, but not for the prince, who, as they knew and we know too, never exists, but for something close enough to that fantasy to cause great confusion: the man who didn’t love back but who promised to, promising so well that even beautiful princesses, who knew better but just couldn’t help themselves, continued in a state of disability to pick themselves up.
Then 1 princess said to another, “Your man keeps dangling the carrot.” And the second princess returned the favor to the first one, who said, straight-faced, just this: “Mr. Carrot.” Those 2 words loosened all the muscles that kept the princesses from smiling, all 500,000 (or more) of them.
And lickety-split, like a cottontail seen at sundown, the false luxury of a phantasm disappeared, freeing the minds and hearts of every beautiful princess who had ever lived, all of whom, dead for centuries or living just like you and me, down the street from one another or right across a rainbow, put on their red shoes, which waited, ready, always at the front door, to dance a princess to her favorite hangout for a special coffee drink or dessert, which, as you may have guessed, was anything but carrot cake.
NOTE TO THE READER ~ Princesses, while they perfectly thicken the plot of love, are simply a literary loveliness and convenience, as the author’s hope is that readers who may not be princesses, due to economics or to gender, sex, or some other self-identification, but who find themselves in the princesses’ plight, might likewise find their self-rescue in the embracing humor of their friends.
- June 9, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
- Comments 2
Maturing sexiness
The word “naughty” trivializes eroticism and sex. A popular synonym for “sexy,” “naughty” is a sly, little smile with an insinuating wink that force sex into a playground that is associated with children. Making love is play, looking and feeling sexy is play, but adults make love and children look pathetic in sexed-up attire. “Pathetic” in that sentence does mean arousing pity. Children are not capable of the richly erotic sexuality that powers a mature and, if chosen by a person, continually maturing sexiness.
“Naughtiness” defined as disobedience deserves mild punishment. Sexy adults may be disobedient in terms of societal norms, but they are not bad girls or bad boys–they are grown-ups feeling good about themselves. A grown-up has grown from her experiences so that she can discern what feels good to her and what does not, what gives her ease and what does not. Not all people over the age of 21 have accomplished that. One of the best things about being a grown-up is that you get to make choices about how you enjoy yourself and with whom.
“Naughtiness” is also a cute kind of indecency. Honestly! What a ridiculous way to perceive or talk about a grown-up man or woman.
- June 3, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 1
Stripes and bows
I saw a short, tight dress in a shop window. Pink and red bows, rather large, floated relatively randomly over a background of black and white vertical stripes. Insistent connotations. The female body as a prison cell for any man tempted by flirtatious femininity. The female body imprisoned underneath that same feminine overlay.
- May 31, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Men and women
- Comments 0
Removed/refreshed
I deleted my Facebook account last week. I’d been wondering for a while what to do with it.
I opened the account in December 2008 thinking that Facebook would be fun professionally more than personally. I said to friends soon after I’d begun that it was “fascinating and dorky.” Read more
- May 28, 2010
- Filed under: Bookshelf, art, and media, My work
- Comments 1
Sweat on the back of my neck
I took a walk this morning and bought groceries halfway through. The bags were very heavy. Shoulders down and back, with ease, as I walked home in the increasing heat. The prediction is for 100 degrees today. (If that happens, it will be the first 100-degree day of the year. Late for Tucson.) Blueberry, raspberry, and white chocolate muffin, with unsalted butter, loose gunpowder green tea, brewed strong, with a bit of nettle, a not-too-thin slice of mozzarella. AC not on yet. Heat and sweat flow over strong shoulders, flexible neck, a face with no makeup and under thick hair covering the scalp. The sweat feels especially delicious on the back of my neck. I put up my hair.
The buddha girls who love change
“The buddha girls who love change.” That phrase charmed me, wowed me, as soon as my friend said it. She’d never said it before.
Buddha. Anyone can be a buddha. Like THE Buddha himself, you devotedly practice yoga and meditation.
Girls. Grown women who like to play, who are playful.
Love. The deepest affection and kindness. Rather than passion, whose fever leads the soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body into turbulence.
Change. Anicca is a Pali word meaning impermanence. Pali was the Buddha’s language, and impermanence defines all of life. Anicca is at the core of meditation practice within Buddhist lineages. Everything changes–that’s an awareness that comes from such practice. An awareness that transcends mental understanding and that a yogi could describe as equanimous. Commonly, people fear change. Fear kills equanimity.
Buddha girls are beautiful. Beauty is their ground and essence. Fear kills beauty.
Buddha girls are beautiful because they align with change.
Life-altering
I heard about a book–or movie, news story, disease, unexpected occurrence–this morning while half listening to NPR that an announcer, interviewer, or talk show guest called “life-altering.” The adjective “life-altering” caught my attention, but neither its object nor the speaker did, because the use of “life-altering” seemed arbitrary.
Although a “system” exists for calling something life-altering and includes matters of loss and gain and of life and death, that system feels pat, both too inclusive and not inclusive enough. Too inclusive: a new job, a firing, a retirement; marrying and divorcing; giving birth or expiring are life-altering because they mark what people consider to be monumental, grand, or absolutely memorable. Not inclusive enough: everything is life-altering because individuals’ reactions–or non-reactivity–to all that comes their way leaves a subconscious imprint.
Petite, unimposing, forgotten–no matter. The small composes the large, the ephemeral composes the earth-shattering, and quintessentially prosaic acts and impressions, whether old and latent, superficial and seemingly forgotten and inconsequential, or unconscionably self-critical, determine life alterations, what human beings call fate.
- May 25, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind
- Comments 0
Rushing minds in rushed bodies
Some journalists who host talk shows or speak on them talk really fast. I wonder if it’s because they feel pushed by a time limit. I wonder if they’re conscious of their pace, which sometimes has me laughing, as do the halts, overall jumpiness, and even stumbling over words that often accompany the speed. The voices impress me as overloaded–with information that a person wishes to communicate? With emotions that must be suppressed in order to convey objectivity? Actually, the vocal rate and rhythms sound excessively excited and not at all neutral. Rushing minds in rushed bodies. Vocal urgency expresses lack of peace, lack of pleasure.
During my time as a professor, students every now and then told me that I talked really fast in class. They were right.
I’m not thinking that the rapid speech I hear on the radio or TV makes the ideas or facts that it contains any more or less credible than does slower speaking, but the hurry conveys anxiety. More particularly, I feel mildly anxious listening. The journalists’ haste makes waste of my peace, if I let it do so. When I laugh, peace resolves the anxiety.
I wonder if the interviewers and interviewees talk that fast at home. If so, I’m glad that they don’t live with me. I’d rather be living with a person of sensuous speed, meaning movement through time and space rather than rapidity; a sensuous speed that communicates self-awareness and quickens my own.
- May 22, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind
- Comments 0
