We know that a clear and succinct form of feedback one gets when making love is orgasm, hence the natural pursuits and attentions we give it. Imagine if we had that clear of a response with each conversation--there would be either no minor or catastrophic mistakes ever made, or an awful lot of faked "orgasms"!
Emotional transparency is not easy for most people--especially those who have been in and out of the school of hard knocks or have had their egos bruised throughout their personal lives or careers. If you are becoming keenly aware that trust and fear of change are issues you need to tackle, and you don't want to "air your laundry" in front of anyone, journaling is a safe and effective practice for exploring the roots of your pain points.
What’s interesting is the fact that two of the four portraits by area artists featured on the cover of the Arts & Culture section of my local paper are of white women with a hand over her mouth. What are the odds? Finally, it seems, we are all standing together on the threshold of being able to name out loud what has been churning in our bellies for centuries! This is the first story I write, after dozens of drafts over the years, that has substance one can sink their figurative teeth into. It’s a story of stories that can get really ugly and hard to hear. It’s a story of the end of self recrimination, the beginning of the end of a cognitive dissonance so foggy that one forgets they had once been in search of clarity.
The battle between Wisps and Chains. Sounds intriguing. When I muse about the notion of volition–one’s calling or journey–and how the path one walks can twist or turn (or not), I think about spirituality and economics and the subtle or raging battles between the two.
The idea of dynamic stability and not wasting (anything) is extremely inspiring to me. And, with the truths of my heart chords strummed awake by Robin Wall Kimmerer's messages of "raise a garden, raise a ruckus" and "give the Branson prize to the trees", and "the generous resilience of the plants show us how to get back up and keep going", I am ready to feel more humbly aware of the gifts our Mother Earth gives us and, like a petulant child coming to her senses, more carefully attend to my responsibility to her.
Artificial Intelligence. Why do we down play the first word and up play (or worship) the second? In Biographies of Hegemony: The Culture of Smartness and the Recruitment and Construction of Investment Bankers, Karen Zouwen Ho writes: “The ‘culture of smartness’ is central to understanding Wall Street’s financial agency, how investment bankers are personally and institutionally empowered to enact their worldviews, export their practices, and serve as models for far-reaching socioeconomic change. On Wall Street, ‘smartness’ means much more than individual intelligence; it conveys a naturalized and generic sense of ‘impressiveness,’ of elite, pinnacle status and expertise, which is used to signify, even prove, investment bankers’ worthiness as advisors to corporate America and leaders of the global financial markets. To be considered ‘smart’ on Wall Street is to be implicated in a web of situated practices and ideologies, co produced through the interactions of multiple institutions, processes, and American culture at large, which confer authority and legitimacy on high finance and contribute to the sector’s vast influence. The culture of smartness is not simply a quality of Wall Street, but a currency, a driving force productive of both profit accumulation and global prowess.”
July: The Seventh Feature in 2020 — The Year of Truth — Focus: DNA — Telomeres and Terpenes From an early Nature Research July 2020 publication by Karen Miga et.al.: “After two decades of improvements [attempting to map human DNA], the current human reference genome (GRCh38) with hundreds of unresolved gaps [in sequencing, has been surpassed.]… [A] de novo human genome assembly … with the first gapless, telomere-to-telomere assembly of a human [X] chromosome … was enabled by … nanopore sequencing of the … CHM13 [human] genome.” In other words, a couple of weeks ago scientists were successfully able to begin cloning homo sapiens. Females anyway. Because this is more than I want to think about right now, I’ll just say that if you Google “clone female” you’ll get this:
Sunday was Father’s Day. It was an intense day in an intense week in an intense month in a freaking intense year. Very early in the morning, during the hours when I was supposed to be subconsciously processing the intensity of the day before, I had a thought: what would I do if I was in solitary confinement for a year? Would I go insane immediately? If not, what kind of games would I play with my mind in order to protect my sanity? I imagined myself getting tortured with being woken up every 90 minutes for what felt like an eternity. Each time, I went through the roll call of my family members names so I wouldn’t forget them.
The first thing that comes to mind about menopause is the fact that women literally start to fall apart with this life change. The comorbidities include heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, stroke, dementia, auto immune disorders, general emotional un-wellness, and a variety of cancers -- not to mention the symptoms and effects such as sleeplessness, hot flashes, loss of bone density, etc. In searching for menopause shame I noticed that women speaking boldly about the stigmas around it are creating distance by naming it "the menopause."
When I think of inside-out I think about the way our bodies inform us - the subtle hints when something is starting to go wrong like a sixth sense, or the all too easy to ignore messages that our stomachs and other organs give us when our physical or emotional states are off kilter. At the moment, inside-out feels like the very real conversations we each need to have with ourselves.
