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Showing posts with label Beauty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beauty. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Archetypes: The Explorer

In my June 26th blog post, I introduced us to the Museum of Pop Culture's Queen Within show. Today, we will explore the second archetype they discuss - the Explorer.

 She is a pioneer, adventurer, and a rebel. She's all over challenges and rejects authority. Her strengths are determination and independence, and her fears are conventionality, inner emptiness and boredom.

In this exhibit, the Explorer woman rebelled against the rigid framework of beauty and consumerism. She wore clothes that paid attention to issues of gender, race, and disability.

She is symbolized by the planets, the moon, the egg, the night, and the turtle.

What do you wear that expresses your inner Explorer? What makes you feel strong and determined?


Saturday, October 20, 2018

#MyFinal24 for Alexandra Franzen!


My friend Alexandra Franzen has written a new book - So This Is The End: a love story. 

The central question of the book is, "If you had just 24 hours to live, what would you do with your time?"

Of course, my brain went into overtime thinking of what I'd do for my final twenty-four.



1. The first thing I'd do is check on my legal documents. I want to make sure my loved ones have all the information they need to have a good life after I am gone.

2. I'd make love to the Charming Man. *hearts*

3. I'd write love notes to my friends and family so they would know how much they have meant to me. Heck, I'd write The One I Had To Say Goodbye To, just to let them know that they had made my life a better place.

4. I'd sneak a few love notes into the Charming Man's drawers and desk. Something to make him smile!

5. I'd make love to the Charming Man. (He better have taken his vitamins)

6. I'd put my money where my mouth is. I take a lump sum of money and just hand it out to people higgley-piggly. We all deserve a windfall. We all deserve some unexpected blessings. And I would want one of my final acts to be one that brought joy to the world.

7. Then I'd invite everyone I could over to my house and I would have a huge party. Lots of dancing, lots of crazy costumes, exquisite food, games, hugs, kisses, cuddles, and soulful talks. Maybe sneak in some lovemaking with the Charming Man. We would play all night long, because play feeds the body, mind, and soul.

Whew! That's a full 24 hours. What would be on your list?

Monday, January 2, 2017

Curiosity: Rice Museum of Rocks and Minerals

Exploring is very important for writers, dreamers, lovers, and well, everyone, really. I like discovering cool things about my local area. So I visited the Rice Museum of Rocks and Minerals.


The museum building was originally constructed by Richard and Helen Rice as their family home in 1952. Richard Rice, a logger by profession, incorporated many rare Oregon woods, such as myrtle wood and quilted maple, in the fabrication of their house. The Rices built a gallery in their basement to display their amazing personal mineral collection. In 1997, the entire building was converted to a public museum, and an additional gallery building was constructed in 2005.

I love learning how the world works. Learning just a little bit of this geology was enough to get my imagination firing.

Enough talk! Let's look at their amazing, mind-opening stuff.
I don't even remember what this is, but wow!
The Charming Mother in Law with an enormous opal.

Imagine the forces it took to create such beauty.

The perfect place for a wizard to meditate.

These agates make these "landscapes" all on their own!

I could see a sort of fantastical entity hiding in here.

Ancient Tiger skull. Yowza!

I love Lapis Lazuli.

What story do you see in this piece?

The Rice's amazing house.

This makes me think of the wings on my angels in the Blood Wings series.

I think Lance's wings float like the chalcedony...
Can't you just see the feathers?





Monday, July 20, 2015

Self-love and The Beauty Myth.

Naomi Wolf
I was doing some wandering in my old files and found these words of wisdom from Naomi Wolf, from The Beauty Myth.

***



            Can there be a pro-woman definition of beauty? Absolutely. What has been missing is play. The beauty myth is harmful and pompous and grave because so much, too much, depends on it. The pleasure of playfulness is that it doesn’t matter. Once you play for stakes of any amount, the game has become a war game, or compulsive gambling. In the myth, it has been a game for life, for questionable love, for desperate and dishonest sexuality, and without the choice not to play by alien rules.  No choice, no free will; no levity, no real game.
 
          But we can imagine, to save ourselves, a life in the body that is not value-laden; a masquerade, a voluntary theatricality that emerges from abundant self-love. A pro-woman redefinition of beauty reflects our redefinitions of what power is. Who says we need a hierarchy? Where I see beauty may not be where you do. Some people look more desirable to me than they do to you. So what? My perception has no authority over yours. Why should beauty be exclusive? 

Admiration can include so much. Why is rareness impressive? The high value of rareness is a masculine concept, having more to do with capitalism than with lust. What is the fun in wanting the most what cannot be found? Children, in contrast, are common as dirt, but they are highly valued and regarded as beautiful.

  
        How might women act beyond the myth? Who can say? Maybe we will let our bodies wax and wane, enjoying the variations on a theme, and avoid pain because when something hurts us it begins to look ugly to us. Maybe we will adorn ourselves with real delight, with the sense that we are gilding the lily. Maybe the less pain women inflict on their bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us. Perhaps we will forget to elicit admiration from strangers, and find we don’t miss it; perhaps we will await our older faces with anticipations, and be unable to see our bodies as a mass of imperfections, since there is nothing on us that is not precious. Maybe we won’t want to be the “after” anymore.
      
 How to begin? Let’s be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women’s choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes. And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it: In a sensual politics, female is beautiful.

          A woman-loving definition of beauty supplants desperation with play, narcissism with self-love, dismemberment with wholeness, absence with presence, stillness with animation. It admits radiance: light coming out of the face and the body, rather than a spotlight on the body, dimming the self. It is sexual, various, and surprising. We will be able to see it in others and not be frightened, and able at last to see it in ourselves.