Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2020 i Womankind

It’s the one question that we’d all like to know the answer to, so we could just get on with it - the living part, that is. If we knew what the ‘good life’ entailed then we could shun the rest, and just concentrate on the important bits. But society has a tendency to derail us. We’re repeatedly told that the good life is about making loads of money, having a successful career and buying as much as we can possibly shovel into our houses and garages. Some are convinced that they need to be famous and get their name up in lights for the good life to kick in. It’s worth remembering that the phase of flight for the Kunanyia stephaniae butterfly lasts a mere 14 days, long enough…

Along a lone path in a woodland in rural Canada, you notice a bear in the far distance standing outside a cottage surrounded by wildflowers. Suddenly the door of the cottage flings open and out hops a girl singing gaily before conversing with the bear who she befriends at the door. Now compare this enchanting scene to the world of digital communication, to the blunt, rude, short, critical, passive aggressive, manic, dismissive, manipulative, or deeply offensive emails and messages you read every day. Trevor Foulk at the University of Florida thinks that rudeness is contagious, in that the more times we encounter rude messages and people in our lives, the ruder we become ourselves. To prove his point, Foulk set up an experiment where a group of people were shown…

“Ladies approaching seventy must not expect to work like girls of 17 - it is unreasonable,” said the doctor to artist Emily Carr, as he surveyed her studio and racks of canvases against the wall. He rested his eyes on a small monkey, and a mother dog and her four pups on the hearth rug. “Overdoing has enraged your heart. To begin with we will see what a good long rest in hospital will do… Goodness,” he paused, “you have done a lot of work!” “You don’t mean - you are not telling me my painting days are done!” beseeched Carr. She was thinking specifically of her old caravan trailer and her many sketching forays into the Canadian woods. “Oh, lovely, all-alone caravan-days in the quiet, woodsey camps with my…

Love and work, the experts say. Wholeheartedly invest your resources, talents, time, and energy into developing loving connections with other people and work that is meaningful and makes a difference. That is a life worth living. But, you might wonder, how do I do this? Our fast-paced, driven, me-centred orientation undermines rather than supports the development of this kind of life. How do I slow down, grow deeper roots, and expand my life beyond the tyranny of the urgent? To this question, I submit this perspective: invest in growing yourself mentally and emotionally. Your relationally-oriented world and your work-oriented world are built on an even deeper foundation. This is the foundation of your inner world. I believe that meaningful work and loving relationships are built on a deep sense of…

“I entered middle age all at once,” writes Marina Benjamin in her book, Middlepause. “There was no real menopausal process, only a Before and After.” A writer living in London, Benjamin is hunched over her laptop viewing old pregnancy photos. There’s a photograph of her against the blank backdrop of the bathroom wall, with her belly, as she describes, taking the “starring role”. And while she quietly reminisces, she superimposes the new version of her onto the old. “I barely recognise myself as the same person catalogued in those pictures… The years have rolled around so fast. I was 37 when I posed for those pictures, naked and pregnant, now I am 49,” she relates. “Sometimes, but not always, I feel spent.” The middlepause, as Benjamin calls it, is a…

How did your childhood set you on a path to where you find yourself today? I was brought up with a lot of animals around. My parents acquiesced when I wanted rabbits and guinea pigs and turtles, but they didn’t have as good a life as I wanted them to, and they just lived within tiny cages and eventually some of them were neglected. And so, I certainly never forgot that, especially as I became educated about animal sentience. But I always had compassion for animals, whether it was squirrels who were hit by cars or a lonely dog in a back yard. It was always part of me, but I ate animals. I hadn’t made that connection. When my mum moved out to the countryside, she had 10 chickens…

When did you first discover the joy of creating? I distinctly remember being given my first drawing pad and pencils at 12 years old. I spent high school sketching fashions when I should have been paying attention. I thought I’d like to be a fashion illustrator, but when I didn’t get into the one program to which I’d applied, I decided I probably wasn’t very good and hung up my pencil. At age 24 with two children, I found myself in a consciousness raising group and when I complained that at my ripe-old age I’d given up what I really loved doing, the stranger to my right set me straight. She suggested I stop complaining about it and just do it. I’d thought it was too late - at 24…

Light is the best friend of any photographer as can be seen in the winning photograph and finalists of the Womankind’s Photographers’ Award XXII: Light. We are pleased to announce that the winner of this award is the captivating light-filled photograph by Kate Crittenden titled The light that carved the valley, displayed on the opposite page. In second place is the silent scene Two become one by Edward Summerhays, followed by the classically beautiful Pantheon, by Ella Mitchell. Finalists for this award include the intricate photograph titled Archway, by Grace Frances, a photograph where light plays a small, but important, part in the composition. Nurdurrah Cook’s Sparkle and Spin shows the magical effects of light within the dark of night. “I really feel that the carousel’s bright and glittering lights…

“It takes courage to be creative.”- Ellis Paul Torrance How do you see yourself in five years’ time? Or ten years into the future? Where are you living? How are you spending each day? Having an image of your future self, and falling in love with this picture, is, according to late American psychologist and creative researcher Ellis Paul Torrance, a strong predictor of creative achievement. “One of the most powerful wellsprings of creative energy, outstanding accomplishment, and self-fulfilment seems to be falling in love with something - your dream, your image of the future,” he wrote in his paper, The importance of falling in love with something. To test his theory, Torrance, in 1958, began studying children in fourth and fifth grade. “I asked these children what they were…

It’s Easter Sunday and in Little Italy, Sault, a pregnant woman fetches an axe from the woodshed. Back inside, she climbs the stairs and enters the bedroom with care. She doesn’t want to wake her husband, who lies sound asleep after his nightshift at the Algoma Steel Plant. By his bedside, she tightens her grip on the axe, raises it high and brings it down four times. Afterwards, she sits by the fire, arms wrapped around the youngest of her four children. She stays like this for an hour. Eventually, she calls out to a nearby neighbour and tells him what she has done. “Here I am,” she cries, when the police arrive, “Take me. I am ready to die.” Her name was Angelina Napolitano and she was 28 years…

Among all the suffering and carnage the pandemic has wreaked, it has also created fertile ground for experiments in anarchism. In America, the Black Lives Matter movement to defund the police led to one neighbourhood in Seattle declaring itself the ‘Chapel Hill Autonomous Zone’ (CHAZ) - a cop-free mini-republic, with a food bank, street cinema, public lectures, and dancing in the streets. For a week, this little neighbourhood that decided to take itself ‘off-grid’ attracted the media attention of the world. Could it survive? Alas, the experiment in self-government didn’t last long. Within a week, a spate of shootings made the citizens of CHAZ realise they depended on state structures like hospitals. It is often like this with experiments in anarchism. They are often better understood as theatre performances rather…

One day I decided I wanted to be good at surfing. I was 49. It wasn’t the best use of my time, energy, or ego. But, what the hell. I loved being pinballed by the waves. I loved the dolphins that often cruised by. I loved the pelicans, dipping toward the incoming swell to catch its lift, millimetres off the water, graceful, calm. Was it pity or disinterest, that glance they gave me as they passed and I attempted to lurch to my feet? And I loved the actual surfing, those few seconds when I managed to transition from prone to standing, and felt the board lunge forward. I had some things going against me, things that my advancing age didn’t help: knees stiff from almost ten surgeries, back when…

Your pioneering work sits at the nexus of human rights and climate change. Can you describe what this involves? As hunter-gatherer people, we Inuit rely on the conditions in the Arctic which are very challenging. With climatic changes affecting the migration patterns and routes of the animals that we rely on for food, things are becoming unsafe. For us, the snow and the ice represent mobility and transportation and when that becomes precarious, our security is threatened, so for us climate change is not just environmental. It affects our rights, as Inuits, to live as we have for millennia, depending on reliable, traditional knowledge, because now this knowledge is becoming limited in terms of being able to read the conditions for hunting. Now, when the ice freezes, it behaves differently…

An article you read in Womankind changed your life. Can you please tell us a little about what this article was about? The article was titled The Freedom to Fail, in Issue 11 of Womankind. I remember thinking at the time: the freedom to fail? How does failure relate to freedom? I realised my perception of what it was to fail had stopped me doing and being so many things. It had fenced me in. The article, written by Mariana Alessandri, delved into the works of various philosophers and contemporary authors looking at the benefits of changing one’s personal relationship to failure. One of the quotes I remember was “a success-driven mentality prioritises results over process”, and that really resonated because I’m someone who’s all about process, and I do…

Antonia Case:  Antonia Case is Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director of Womankind, Editorial Director of New Philosopher, and co-convener of the discussion series Bright Thinking. She was awarded the 2016 AAP Media Professionals’ Award for excellence in the presentation of philosophy in the media. Her forthcoming book Flourish will be published by Bloomsbury Sigma. Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore: Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore writes for New Philosopher, The Guardian, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Statesman, New Internationalist, The Huffington Post, and Time magazine. Niamh Boyce: Niamh Boyce was named Newcomer of the Year at the 2013 Irish Book Awards for The Herbalist, her first novel. She won the 2012 Hennesssy XO New Irish Writer Of The Year Award and Emerging Poetry Award for her poem Kitty. Her second novel,…

What is the secret ingredient to longevity? Is it garlic or turmeric? Is it drinking eight glasses of water a day? Scientists have been to the ends of the Earth in search of the holy grail of longevity. Why is it that some people fall ill and die well before retirement age, while others continue a zestful existence until 100 and beyond? Journalist Dan Buettner tracked down the world’s ‘blue zones’, to the neighbourhoods and homes of the world’s longest living people, and together with a team of medical researchers, anthropologists, demographers and epidemiologists, he sought to uncover what it was that these people had in common. Was it a food, a lifestyle, or a daily habit that could explain a longer life than average? Other than genes, which some…

I have lived all my life in a city, but in my heart I yearn for the wild. I want to see the incandescent lights of the aurora borealis dance through darkness, I want to hear wolves howl, and be surprised by the sudden rush of muffled wings as a snowy owl swoops past. I want to look up at a sky thick with stars, and walk through forests where the trees have been talking to each other for a thousand years. I want to imagine a time before enchantment was lost. The word ‘enchantment’ has its roots in an ancient word that means ‘to sing’. Other words that share this root are ‘chant’ and ‘incantation’ and ‘charm’, which mean to cast a spell, and ‘cantata’ and ‘canticle’, which mean…

You survived in the wilderness for 48 days without food or water. Where did you learn these survival skills? I grew up in rural Saskatchewan. My mum spent about two-and-a-half years in and out of hospital and passed away from cervical cancer when I was seven. There are four of us girls in the family and I’m the second eldest. So, when she passed away, she also left behind my two younger sisters. My dad grew up hunting, fishing, and trapping and we never had a lot of money. So, when Mum died, we were like a ship at sea. She held everybody together in the family. A man who has just lost the love of his life, how can he now try to raise four girls on his own?…

When Marshall McLuhan’s bestselling 1967 book came back from the printer, there was a typo: The Medium is the Message was suddenly The Medium is the Massage. But rather than complain, the legendary Canadian philosopher was delighted. “Leave it alone!” he cried on seeing the mistake. “It’s great, and right on target!”  The title’s play on words - Message/ Massage or Mess Age/Mass Age - “became a teaser,” as McLuhan expounded, “a way of getting attention… The title is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral - it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were, and the general roughing up that any new society gets from…

Marnie Richardson Day one: I go to work in the office. Who would’ve thought a sentence like that would be so meaningful. I am no longer working from home every day. I am no longer working, studying, parenting, schooling, worrying, and having meetings from home every day. I still worry from home if I’m honest. I work part-time for the government in the arts. I am lucky to have a job. Many of my friends who worked in the arts don’t any more. I take a photo of my hand sanitiser next to my hand cream. It is a memory marker. Something I will look back on and think how strange these times were. So much feeling bound up in these two objects, now a permanent fixture on my desk.…

We’d chatted before, but our real meeting took place over a colossal half-finished clay jug. Abigail panicked and called for help as its handle fell off, and as I stood there holding it in place, she told me a bit about her life and her sons. Meanwhile, she applied extra clay where the handle met the jug, bandaging cracks with vinegar-soaked cloth strips like a mother tending to a child’s wounded knee. The jug was proud, curvaceous and tall, barely surviving the extreme conditions placed upon her: a heavy rounded handle and a body scraped to a thinness of only a few millimetres.   Clay being a generous medium, the piece seemed to invite healing by however many hands necessary. As we worked, various bottles and paraphernalia were placed in…

The Book of Small By Emily Carr The legendary Emily Carr was primarily a painter, but she first gained recognition as an author. She wrote seven popular, critically-acclaimed books about her journeys to remote communities and about her life as an artist - as well as her life as a small child in Victoria at the turn of the last century. In this collection of 36 short stories about a childhood in a town that still had vestiges of its pioneer past, Emily Carr tells stories about her family, neighbours, friends and strangers. The Handmaid’s Tale By Margaret Atwood Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife. She may go out once a day to markets whose…

Because I could not stop for Death,He kindly stopped for me;The carriage held but just ourselvesAnd Immortality.We slowly drove, he knew no haste,And I had put awayMy labor, and my leisure too,For his civility.We passed the school where children played,Their lessons scarcely done;We passed the fields of gazing grain,We passed the setting sun.We paused before a house that seemedA swelling of the ground;The roof was scarcely visible,The cornice but a mound.Since then ‘tis centuries; but eachFeels shorter than the dayI first surmised the horses’ headsWere toward eternity.…