The Outward Vs. The Inward

     There are some good articles circulating right now about how young girls are depicting themselves in (online) society and what this means for feminism. Some believe that the up and coming generation is causing a regression for women because they portray themselves, willingly, as sexualized objects through "selfies" including cleavage, pouty lips, and suggestive poses. Others believe that feminism is about a woman's right to act in whatever way she chooses, and that may especially mean going against what is considered polite in society. I suppose every generation is bound to be shocked and ticked off at the ones who fill their former teenage shoes. Elvis appalled our great-grandparents, the Summer of Love made our grandparents feel faint, Britney, Christina, and other midriff-baring, undulating pop stars made our parents grimace. Is it only normal, then, that I should feel distaste every time I see a duck-lipped girl posing in her bathroom?

     There is something to be said for each generation pushing societal boundaries, and that being partially what urges a culture onward to explore new ways of being and struggle with new questions. I'm not advocating for stagnation or censorship by any means. What I will say, however, is that things have changed with the proliferation of the internet. This, too, is a well-worn statement. What I have noticed is that, as Andy Warhol predicted, everyone can be famous for fifteen minutes. Without a publishing company, modeling agency, talent manager, or lawyer to act as a barrier and image guardian between us and the public, we must be more aware of how we are portraying ourselves. When I was growing up, the internet was a great way to chat with my friends and do some spotty research for school work. Now, with social media, it has become a way to share information with friends (and their friends, and stalkers, and future spouses, and future employers) through a carefully-crafted image maker.

     Social media asks, "who are you?" and with an awareness of who we want our audience to be, we answer. I was a teenage girl once. I understand how different the inside of you can feel from the outside of you and how if only people knew what you really had to offer, things could be better. Some girls very much want a boyfriend, and so it is as if social media serves as an interview for admirers. The selfies show what they can really look like. The Twitter fights show that they are tough. The words they use show that they aren't just the goody two shoes you might see in school. The problem with this is not that young people are making bold decisions and using those words as every generation before them has done. The problem is not that they are "just being themselves," but that they are attempting to be some version of themselves that they think someone else wants. They are growing up not just trying on personalities as every teenager has done, but they are basing some of their actions on how it will look on social media and who it might attract.

     To some extent, this is the same old rebellion and self-exploration in new packaging. People base lots of their decisions on what other people think all the time. Should I buy this outfit? Will he like it? This makeup? What if I say I have a better job than I actually do? If I make friends with her, will that get me in? The difference with social media is where and how this processing takes place. Instead of trying on that personality, walking around in it, feeling those feelings, and then making decisions based on that, there is a backwards mechanism. People think about their social media persona as the "Greatest Hits" in order to make their life seem as though it is more fabulous than in reality. As they go about their day, they think in terms of status updates, tweets, and find ways to take pictures of themselves that support this image. They make decisions based on how it will look online instead of how it will feel in real life. Sometimes, when these actions do bounce back into the real world, the emotions and consequences connected to them can be a shock.

      If girls are creating sexualized images of themselves for what they hope will be best-case scenario admirers, what happens when that is not the outcome? When both boys and girls label them with not-so-nice words, when friends' parents will no longer allow them to come over, when the images are downloaded and uploaded and altered and pop up on their phones during class, how does that affect them? Sexuality can be seen as either power or vulnerability. When young girls attempt to use it without fully understanding its implications and far-reaching effects, it is doubtful that they will feel like they're on the cover of Rolling Stone. But what can we do? It is what our parents were afraid of when the pop stars of the 80s and 90s began, as my mother used to say, "dancing like snakes." They wanted to protect us from growing up too fast, from only identifying femininity with sexuality. That is, for me, the root of the problem.

     Women are incredibly diverse creatures. Dove may be lauded for their "True Beauty" campaign that demonstrates women with real bodies, but at the end of the day, it's still women in underwear. How many times does a young girl need to see a scantily-clad lady before that is what she associates herself with? The problem with advocating for the Miley Cyruses in the world of feminism is not that it is wrong to be self-sexualized, but that it is going back to a very narrow view of womanhood. I might say that of course, no one is going to take away our right to wear pants anytime soon, but that is only because they've taken away clothing in general! In this social media-crazy, Pinterest-obsessed, viral video world, we see a build up of images everyday that shapes the way that we think and certainly shapes the way that young women understand their world. Naked women posed just-so to be allowed on album covers. Pole dancing fitness classes. The blasted duck lips sweeping the nation. These are not things that offend me (apart from the duck lips) or belie feminism itself. The ever-present media machine that chooses these images to be shown over and over again, however, will. When all we see or explore in women is their ability to be sexual, that is what will chip away at our progress and the shaping of our young girls.

     As I said, I grew up when the internet was still a fairly tame place with weird chat rooms and slow telephone line speeds. I liked chatting with my friends, but I didn't think about my image online. I didn't have to. Today's girls think a lot about their image online, but it is the way they have been conditioned to think about it that worries me. I also credit much more than the different internet usage back in my day for my upbringing. My mother demonstrated every day what a strong woman was. She had honest conversations with me and didn't attempt to censor my world. She gave me many opportunities to focus on myself - building my true self, that is - through an excellent education, art supplies, and horseback riding lessons. I remember her once talking with a fellow riding mom about how good this was for their girls - that they would have horses instead of boyfriends. Looking back, I have to agree. I hope that I have the opportunity to take away my future daughter's probably tiny and advanced computer cell phone transporter, and set her up with something real. I hope that she will know the feeling of teamwork, overcoming obstacles through hard work, responsibility, and the glorious feeling of a clean animal's warm muscles after two hours of labor. While parents can't protect their kids from the world and mistakes forever, I do believe that they can encourage them to focus on building themselves before they worry about what someone else might want them to be.

Step Step Swat

I tend to need some type of daily walk, much like a dog, to feel complete. It doesn't matter if it is around town, in the woods, along a dusty back road - just put me on a path and let me go. Without it, I feel antsy and caged in, wandering around the house or work not able to focus on one particular task at hand. My dog is a good excuse to find a way to fit it in each day, though really it is almost a meditative practice for me. I like to look at the businesses or wide expanses of fields, notice overgrown weeds or feel the cool forest air on my skin. It is true, however, that some walks are far better than others. The hike that I was fortunate to take yesterday fell into this category of "better."

It is a path that follows a creek offshoot of a larger river. The river itself is pock marked with signs that warn of DANGER and things about rising waters and strong currents and sirens, but the creek is a small trickle of a thing, broken up by bitty waterfalls and little wading pools. It is simply idyllic. After a first try at navigating this portion of the trail, stumbling along a sort of beach with sucking mud and spider lairs, we finally found the well-trodden path through the woods. Different from most other trails I am used to, this one had surprising flora like bamboo patches, purple hydrangeas, jungle-like palms and vines. It also had gnats. LOTS of gnats. I developed a pattern to my walking: step, step, swat, step, step, swat. There was something satisfying about the amount of bugs I was able to make contact with on my forearms that merely brushed them away from my face for the length of two steps. My sweet little old lady Mennonite friend would likely see this as a good way of incorporating arm exercise into the overall leg and cardio workout. She is ever-positive.

There was no real destination in mind except the waterfalls that happened to be along the way. It was too cold to actually get up close and personal with them, but we did wind up splashing a bit in the shallower water. The rocks were mostly covered with scrubby moss, and they bordered each pool as if they had been perfectly designed lagoons. They clouds eventually gave way to a few moments of sun, and the light that came through the canopy of trees was warm and made the whole landscape into a speckled piece of heaven. It got me to wondering if there are bugs in the afterlife. If there are, I hope they are the more fun ones, like butterflies and inchworms. And those little water skimmers.

Just next to one of the wading pools was a bounty of berries. We were fooling around, posing for pictures, and when I looked off into the distance for one shot, I exclaimed at the spray of raspberries just ten feet away. We raced to the bush, each of us claiming all of the berries for ourselves, and proceeded to eat handfuls of them. I picked them off one by one. I filled up my palm with little mounds of them. I must have eaten ten dollars worth of raspberries that were free for the taking in this little wonderland. I hadn't thought that I could ever have enough berries, but when my mouth started to pucker, I knew that was my saturation point. It reminded me of a poem:

Millions of Strawberries

Genevieve Tagged

 

Marcia and I went over the curve,
Eating our way down
Jewels of strawberries we didn't deserve,
Eating our way down.
Till our hands were sticky, and our lips painted,
And over us the hot day fainted,
And we saw snakes,
And got scratched, and a lust overcame us for the red
unmatched
Small buds of berries, till we lay down--
Eating out way down-- and rolled in the berries like two
little dogs
Rolled
In the late gold
And gnats hummed
And it was cold
And home we went, home without a berry,
Painted red and brown
Eating out way down.

It was a tiring, wonderful day.

I Like To Move It Move It

There is something to be said for that desire to go out into the woods and just walk. Bill Bryson articulates the simple strength of this desire in A Walk In The Woods, which I am currently reading and loving. He has both inspiring and hilarious moments as he hikes the Appalachian Trail with his pudgy, whining trailmate and a host of other characters that find themselves alone in the woods together. But take away the waterproof equipment, the fancy foldable cookware, and there you have a person plodding along a beaten path, either on a linear trajectory or my favorite, a loop trail.

It doesn't seem to make sense. Why especially pick a loop trail that will take you in a circle and drop you right where you started a few miles before? Usually we travel to go somewhere, not simply to travel. But hiking is its own purpose. As soon as I get into the thick of the woods and feel the cool air with a hint of forest floor moisture, I'm sold. I don't even spend that much time looking around so much as getting fleeting glimpses of the light through the leaves, fallen branches, some rustling undergrowth. The majority of the time I have my eyes on the path in front of me, navigating around tree roots and jutting rocks. I believe that we house vestigial traces of our nomadic ancestors inside these modern bodies, and that feeling of traveling a winding path, staring up at the stars, and making a fire satisfy something deeply.

On Meditation and Mandalas

     I’ve recently (to my great surprise) attempted to replace my nightly ritual of falling asleep to some DVD (Northern Exposure right now…the Alaskan chill is so tempting in this heat) with meditation. That is, if you can call two nights in a row a trend. I started to meditate again in hopes of feeling better connected to my little inner world and giving myself better guidance for my artwork. Different artists work in various ways – some have a solid direction that I envy, others move seamlessly from one connected idea to another with full bodies of work in between, and others are a little more distractible. Like me. I see something I like, feel inspired by a bit of grass in my yard, learn a new technique and I’m off and running like a raccoon after something shiny. In art school, they will tell you that you need to have a style and a theme to your work. It makes sense. Set yourself apart. Say something cohesive. I’ve always struggled with this bit. I make one version of something and feel like if I make another I will slip into robotic catatonics. Actually, that would be a great band name. But I digress. Even my blog posts do not have much of a connective thread. “Hey guys, ice cream! Hey guys, art! Hey guys, dogs!” The theme is perhaps, Things I Like. I’m most interested in my own work when I can keep it fresh, so my goal recently has been to find this freshness within a common theme. It’s like slowly disciplining my mind and hands to stay together. And I think it’s working. The show I have coming up is definitely incentive to keep it together.

     Often I will cycle back to earlier ideas with new information or techniques to allow them to come to a more successful realization. With this recent meditation, I have been interested in going back to making mandalas. When I attempted them before, I found that I couldn’t effectively translate them into something I felt excited about. I was making small watercolors of them that didn’t fit the bill. Now I am working them into pottery. It gels with what I want my ceramics to say – and now that I know several techniques of inscribing thin, controlled lines onto my pieces, I’ve been able to get it to all work.

     Mandalas have been part of various cultures in some form or another – Native Americans used them for healing properties, we can see them in stained glass rose windows in cathedrals, and they are most commonly known for their part in Buddhist and Hindu spiritual practices. It is seen as representing the universe from a design perspective. Mandala creation is touted for centering the mind as a meditative technique in itself. I find that as I make them, the structure of the circle and symmetry allows me to let go and be surprised in the end by what I’ve just drawn. The overall look reminds me of those wonderful, colorful, and expensive kaleidoscopes I would slowly turn while I watched the tiny world inside flip into new patterns. Places that had these were always filled with glass objects and glass shelves and I walked with my hands pressed close to my sides, feeling like at any moment I would lose control of my body and it would stumble into everything all at once. Again, I digress.

     Mandalas also just happen to fit pretty perfectly onto the face of a plate. I’ve found that the best way to get the design into the clay is by starting with a drawing of the mandala, then tracing over it in your basic washable crayola marker. Then, on the flat template of the plate, press the mandala drawing onto the moist clay, rub, and peel away to see the design transferred. Mold the plate into the desired  shape and allow to dry to a hard leather hard. Carve away the lines and fill them with colored slip or underglaze, mishima style. Wipe away the excess color after it too has dried, and reveal your final pattern! I still have yet to decide how to best finish it with glaze…not sure if I should use various underglazes for each separate shape or cover with one transparent glaze that will let the lines show through. Tests to come.

So, how do you center yourself?

A rose by any other name might be sherbet.

As we are now looking into the face of summer, it's again time for projects, recipes, and blogging.

Projects: learning the banjo and pumping out artwork for a show mid-summer
Recipes: Rose Sherbet
Blogging: you're looking at it.

I've been wanting to try this rose sherbet for a while now, ever since I saw it in a cookbook of recipes made at Roald Dahl's house. Here is this bowl of lovely pink treat, made of just water, sugar, lemon, glycerine and rose petals. It appeals to my love for simple foods and my preference for pink.

Lucky for me, we just so happen to have the most sweet-smelling Linda McCartney rosebush in front of our house that I have adored for many seasons. It is bursting with flowers right now, and I cut 5 from it for this sherbet.

Water and sugar boil together to form the syrup, then the rose petals and lemon zest are added to make a sort of flower tea. The concoction sits overnight and by this point has turned a sad beige color with greenish white petals floating in it like wet toilet paper. Stay with me.

Once the petals are strained out, glycerine and lemon juice are added, turning the whole thing a joyous pink again.

The final result is frozen with frequent stirrings to keep it loose and it tastes like a lemon Italian ice with strong floral notes.

In my opinion, the perfect ode to the start of summer.