Before & After: My Imperfection is My Nature

From “Last-Minute Doubts, New York City,” interviews by Joanna Miller, The New York Times, May 1, 2011:

ANNA MEDVEDEVA, 24: The photo was taken the night before my breast-augmentation, chin- and neck-liposuction surgeries, and I was very confused and was thinking, What are you doing with yourself, girl? I spent all that day at home preparing for surgery. I was alone with my fear that night, and I was thinking that I wanted to change my decision. So I tried on the bandage that I would have to wear on my face after the surgery. I felt scared and called my best friend, who really helped me so much. My friend and I talked as Amy took pictures of me. In some, I was nude, and when the light went through the window from the street and I saw myself, I thought, I’m already perfect. My imperfection is my nature. Now, after everything is done, I love it so much. I look to the mirror, and I’m like: “Wow, you’re so sexy. I want you, girl.”

AMY ARBUS: A week before this photo session, Anna told me she was having plastic surgery, and I asked to do before-and-after pictures. Toward the end of this shoot, she started getting nervous about the surgery, and I said, “You can still change your mind.” She was on the phone a lot with her girlfriend, and when we were done, she was looking to see if she had heard back, and that’s when I took that picture. It was the last one I took.

Wherever We Are

Residence/Inn
by Daron Larson

The hotel room is roomier
now that we’re older,
largely because of your frequent business travel
which rewards loyalty with extra comforts.

There’s even a small kitchen,
though nothing to eat,
and a living room with a couch
that can become a bed for guests.

I pull back the curtains to let the light in.
You’ve already managed to unpack
everything we’ve brought
and sort it all into the drawers —
a tendency I used to tease you about.

The bathroom counter is organized
(his, his).

The white towels hang perfectly undisturbed.
Our books and electronics wait on our nightstands
(yours, mine).

How can we ignore the similarity
between borrowing and owning?
Is it possible not to notice that
home is wherever we are?

When I get up in the middle of the night
to use the bathroom,
I take care to step over the dog,
even though she’s asleep in the kennel
not far from where we live,
hoping to wake from
the confusion of her disrupted routine.

In the morning, we make the bed.
You find coffee and read the paper
while I try to let go of my story
until the bell rings,
and then again whenever I’m able
after the sound trails off.

On the other side of the door
waits a blend of familiarity and strangeness,
not unlike every other door we have ever
closed or opened,
locked or walked through,
alone or together,
for as long as we both have lived.

The Bright Home in Which I Live

The House of Belonging
by David Whyte, from The House of Belonging

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,

it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,

this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,

the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of the housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

Strangers No More

This 39-minute film about a school in south Tel Aviv gets my vote for best Oscar-nominated documentary short subject. The principal and teachers of Bialik-Rogozin School enthusiastically embrace the challenges of educating children from all over the world, many of whom have experienced extraordinary violence, loss, and displacement. It is a remarkable and inspiring study of resilience nurtured by providing a safe environment, finding common ground in the midst of dizzying diversity, and igniting passion for learning.

Strangers No More Movie Trailer - Bialik Rogozin School from Simon & Goodman Picture Co. on Vimeo.

Excruciating Vulnerability

“When you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they’ll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.”

~ Brené Brown, from “The Power of Vulnerability” TED Talks, June 2010

 

@c4chaos

Still Lost

"I never, in any city I've ever been in, never remember the names of streets. The longest place I ever lived in was for five years and I didn't know the name of the next street over. Why bother! I think there's such enjoyment in just getting lost in a city. Having no idea where you are, how you're gonna get out of it. Getting to be the middle of the night, you're still lost, walking around. That's the best way to discover a city. That's how you're born into life. You got no freaking idea which way's up or down."

~ Christian Bale, in an interview with John H. Richardson for Esquire

See also: The Business from KCRW (December 13, 2010)

Become What You Are

Excerpt from the introduction of Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up by Norman Fischer:

Time is strange. We live within it, depend on it, take it for granted, yet it relentlessly passes, and our lives slip through our fingers moment by moment. Where does time come from, and where does it go? How is it that every moment we are different, we grow, we develop, we are born, we die? What are we supposed to be doing with this life?

After many years of grappling with these questions during the course of my long spiritual journey, I have come to have a feeling for their answers. We don’t really know what appears, what time is, where it goes. But we are here to try to understand. And we all have our own way of understanding, and of expressing that understanding through the living of our lives.

Each of us has a place in this world. Taking that place, I have come to feel, is our real job as human beings. We are not generic people, we are individuals, and when we appreciate that fact completely and allow ourselves to embrace it and grow into it fully, we see that taking our unique place in this world is the one thing that gives us a sense of ultimate fulfillment.

Bantu tribesmen, it is said, sneak into the rooms of their children as they sleep and whisper in their ears, “Become what you are.”

To take our place is to mature, to grow into what we are. Mostly we take maturity for granted, as if it were something that comes quite naturally and completely as our bodies grow and our minds and hearts fill up with life experience. In fact, however, few of us are truly mature individuals; few of us really occupy our places. We are merely living out a dream of maturity, a set of received notions and images that passes for adulthood. What does it really mean to grow up? How do we do the work that will nurture a truly mature heart from which can flow healing words and deeds? Each of our lives depends on our undertaking the exploration that these questions urge us toward. And the mystery is that the whole world depends on each of us to take this human journey.

Where You Are

Lost
by David Wagoner, from Traveling Light 

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Belonging, Blooming, and Beginning Again

If worries were stones that could be polished by rolling around repeatedly in our minds, one of the shiniest rocks in my tumbler would have to be wondering where I really belong. Growing up in Wichita, Kansas I was convinced I was being excluded from a much more Technicolor city. In New Mexico I quickly grew bored of the piercingly blue skies and yearned for thunderstorms. Ohio seemed to choose me instead of the other way around. I don't strongly identify with many of the aspects of my life and personality that make easy answers to casual questions about who I am or what I do.

All this becomes especially distressing when I'm convinced that everyone else not only knows for certain where they belong but have also managed to get there. It reminds me of the paradox that throws so many people off about meditation: the way it appears on the outside doesn’t give a very reliable indication of what it feels like on the inside.

I recently had the extravagantly good fortune to practice mindfulness intensively in an idyllic setting near the ocean, with Birds of Paradise thriving in early January, and a few peacocks adding spontaneous local color. Yet I found myself wondering if I really belonged there — even as a visitor.

As much sincere intention as I put into weeding out unrealistic assumptions about life, I've managed to hold onto the notion that some perfect fit exists for each of us. I don't want to blame this on Hollywood or religion or advertising — aren't they all just responding to the strong craving for narrative which seems to be hardwired into our nervous systems? It’s that same inherited impulse toward security and the sense that each of us is actually the main character in this one long reality show.

Practicing mindfulness over time can lead to a direct and deepening awareness that nothing is unchanging. Could this apply to my perpetual desire to belong? What if there really is no satisfying it in the same way we never seem to reach the point of having the right amount of money or time?

What if instead of finding out exactly where I belong, I put my energy into belonging where I find myself at any given moment? This means making ourselves at home scraping snow from the windshield, listening to the hold music, drinking coffee, sitting through another boring meeting, watching a great movie, waiting to see the doctor, washing our hands, and dropping off the recyclables. To really bloom where we find ourselves planted begins with settling in, soaking up whatever our roots can reach, and celebrating the sprouting as well as the whole climb toward blooming.

What would it feel like to at least attempt to notice and accept all the many points along the way — the pleasant episodes as well as the unpleasant ones? If we can practice embracing the hundreds of different places we find ourselves each day (physically, mentally, emotionally), then we're well on our way to belonging wherever we go.