Justine Musk's Blog, page 3

it’s time for you to go on an adventure

“It’s not what you’ve got. It’s about how brave you’re prepared to be.”

— Seth Godin

It’s time for you to go on an adventure.

It begins

with the knowing

that ‘here’ is a place you can’t stay.

The journey owns you.

It’s time to go deep

and take back the gold in the dark.

The power and the light.

The power is your birthright.

They stole it from you.

(Perhaps they didn’t mean to.)

It’s time to see the world

through a heart broken open.

This is how we find our deeper selves.

If you’re on someone else’s path–

it’s not your path.

If someone else tells the story–

it’s not your story.

Where you burn

is the doorway

into a bigger life.

It’s time for you to go on an adventure.

the art of being a heroine

Heroine.

The word makes you think, maybe, of a damsel in distress: flinging hand to forehead, getting tied to a railroad track somewhere by a villain with impressive facial hair.

Heroines provide opportunities for the hero to prove his heroism. They serve and support by acting as the hero’s moral conscience, or by serving as his muse, or by dying prematurely so that he can go after the bad guys and avenge her in manly ways.

“In the whole mythological tradition,” Joseph Campbell is quoted as saying, “the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to. When a woman realizes what her wonderful character is, she’s not going to get messed up with the notion of being pseudo-male.”

I don’t buy it.

As a little girl, I wasn’t playing house or planning my dream wedding or decapitating Barbie dolls in increasingly creative ways.

I fantasized about being a female Jedi Knight.

I enacted entire scenarios in my family’s living room. I hungered for female action heroes like Ripley or Nikita or Sarah O’Conner: women who kicked ass but were also recognizably women, with a complex and full-blooded humanity of their own.

Buffy? We were starved for her.

It’s not that we didn’t care about cute boys and awesome clothes and best friends forever; we just knew that there was a world out there, and we wanted to explore it, wanted to dance on some moonlit foreign beach to the rhythm of our own deepest natures. We heard the call of the times as fiercely as anyone. We, too, want to rise with our gifts, our service, instead of watching from the sidelines as we wait

(so much waiting)

for the hero to come claim us as his reward.

I have lost count of the number of times someone has clicked through to my blog by searching for ‘how to be a female badass’ or ‘how to be a badass woman’.

As overused as the word has become, badass implies power and mastery and more than a little charisma. It might even involve an awesome pair of leather pants.

It’s also, as a blog reader once informed me, a masculine word. Words like strong and powerful cut against the softness of traditional femininity. Adventurous and independent and bold get tagged as male characteristics.

If a woman demonstrates these traits, she is somehow not properly feminine.

She is getting “messed up with the notion of being pseudo-male.”

I don’t buy that, either.

If women get “messed up”, it’s because we absorb the message that in order to pursue worldly accomplishment, to take up public space, our femininity needs to pack itself away. We learn that power, strength, independence, boldness, ambition and adventure are heroic qualities, and our job as females is not to be heroic, but perfect.

Perfection involves whittling ourselves down to size, and not just physically.

In her poem “A Work of Artifice”, Marge Piercy argues that the quote-unquote “female role” is so restrictive that girls are shaped from birth in order not to outgrow it: “the bound feet/ the crippled brain/ the hair curlers/ the hands you/ love to touch.”

If you want to go big or go home, “femininity” becomes something a woman needs to suppress. It becomes important to mock ‘girly’ things like manicures and Lifetime movies. To declare: I hate the color pink. To declare: I prefer the company of men. To declare: I don’t trust other women.

We grow up steeped like tea bags in messages and images that convey something vaguely shameful about being a female body: body hair and body fat, periods and appetites. We must remove, monitor, conceal, repress, suppress, pare away.

We must be pure.

So how can we be the heroes of our lives without being “pseudo-males”, how can we be heroines without beingheroines?

“I’d come to see….” writes Carol Lee Flinders, “that at critical junctures language regularly fails women for the simple reason that in male-centered cultures language just isn’t set up to speak for women or carry women’s meanings. This is one of the subtler aspects of the silencing of women.”

We’re silenced not because we’re forbidden to express ourselves; we’re silenced because the words we need don’t seem to exist.

In an earlier post, I played with the ‘creatrix’ archetype:

“My idea of a creatrix was this: a woman who maintains strong relationships with others while cultivating her natural gifts and pursuing mastery, for however long it takes her. She actively uses her gifts in service of herself, her loved ones, and the world. She is grounded, sensual, and comfortable in her body. She recognizes her birthright to pleasure and play. She believes in interdependence and interbeing: she is her own person while knowing that we are at least partly defined by our relationships. She may or may not have kids. Chances are she tried the conventional thing, or came close – the wedding, the ‘safe’ job or career, the house in the suburbs – and it didn’t work out. So now she lives in the country/on the beach/in a loft downtown/in Thailand.

She is not afraid of power: standing up to it, speaking truth to it, or using it to advance her own agenda.

She is not afraid to have an agenda.”

I also came across this quote by Henry David Thoreau:

“One should be always on the trail of one’s own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine. Finding and then embracing our calling helps bring us to our true self.”

That, I thought, is how to be heroic, for men and women both: to fearlessly live out your “own essential nature” in a way that connects you to meaning, your true self, a sense of the bigger picture; to be at home in the world.

To be whole.

heroine’s journey: the quest to find your soul + be a badass

Hello dearest reader. This is an excerpt from a longer thing that I am working on.

Heroine.

It’s a problematic word. It makes you think of the women of melodrama, flinging hand to forehead, fainting whenever the plot requires it, getting kidnapped and tied to a railroad somewhere by a villain with impressive facial hair.

These are not the women going out into unknown lands, battling the dragons that uphold the status quo, and changing the world.

Heroines provide opportunities for the hero to prove his heroism. They serve and support him by acting as his moral conscience, by serving as his muse, by dying prematurely so that her man can go after the bad guys and act in manly ways.

A heroine is the reward the hero collects at the end.

“In the whole mythological tradition,” Joseph Campbell is quoted as saying, “the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to. When a woman realizes what her wonderful character is, she’s not going to get messed up with the notion of being pseudo-male.”

Well.

I don’t buy it.

I, for one, don’t want and have never wanted to simply be there, the place for someone else to travel to: I wanted to do some traveling and questing of my own. As a little girl, I wasn’t playing house or planning my dream wedding or decapitating Barbie dolls in increasingly creative ways. I fantasized about being a female Jedi Knight. I enacted entire scenarios in the privacy of our living room. I hungered for female action heroes like Ripley or Nikita or Sarah O’Conner: women who kicked ass but were also recognizably women, with a complex and full-blooded humanity of their own whether or not they showed off their tight stomachs.

The breakout success of a television character named Buffy the Vampire Hunter didn’t surprise me at all.

We were starved for her.

It’s not that we didn’t care about cute boys and awesome clothes and best friends forever and making the cheerleader squad and having a family one day; we just knew that there was a very big world out there, and we wanted to explore it, have our own unique adventures, dance on some moonlit foreign beach to the pulsing rhythms of our own deepest natures. We heard the call of the times as fiercely as anyone; we, too, wanted to rise to meet it with our gifts, our service, instead of watching from the sidelines, waving pompoms or bringing out the snacks.

We don’t want to be male, pseudo or otherwise.

We just want to be badasses.

I have lost count of the number of times someone has clicked through to my blog by searching for ‘how to be a female badass’ or ‘how to be a badass woman’. Not strong woman or powerful woman and definitely not heroine.

Badass.

Badass implies power and mastery and coolness and more than a little charisma, possibly decked out in an awesome pair of leather pants. It’s also, as a blog reader once informed me, a masculine word. ‘Strong’ and ‘powerful’ are masculine words as well, in that they cut against the softness of traditional notions of femininity. Adventurous and independent and bold are also tagged as male characteristics. To reach for these qualities, then, means that a woman is behaving in a way that alienates her from herself. She is getting “messed up with the notion of being pseudo-male.”

I don’t buy that, either.

If women get “messed up”, it’s because we absorb the message that in order to pursue worldly accomplishment, to take up public space, to quote-unquote get ahead in ways other than landing an appropriate husband, our femininity needs to get packed away in some dark forgotten corner of ourselves. We learn that power, strength, independence, boldness, ambition and adventure are heroic qualities, and our job as females is not to be heroic, but to be perfect.

Perfection involves whittling ourselves down to size, and not just physically.

In her poem “A Work of Artifice”, Marge Piercy argues that the quote-unquote “female role” is so restrictive that girls are shaped from birth to stay small and narrow enough not to outgrow it: “the bound feet/ the crippled brain/ the hair curlers/ the hands you/ love to touch.” To be feminine is to play small. If you want to go big or go home, “femininity” becomes something a woman needs to suppress and distance herself from: it becomes important to mock ‘girly’ things like manicures and Lifetime movies. To declare: I hate the color pink. To declare: I’m more comfortable with men than women. Or: I don’t trust other women.

This, perhaps, is what it truly means to go “pseudo-male”: not by acting boldly or pursuing ambition or adventure, but by participating in the lie of feminine inferiority, to buy into a concept of femininity inherited from patriarchy, to see ourselves through a gaze that measures us by how good we look in jeans and heels and bandage dresses. We grow up steeped like tea bags in these ideas and messages and images that there is something vaguely contaminated and even shameful about being inside a female body, with hair and periods and body fat and appetites that must be removed, monitored, concealed, eliminated, pared away.

We must be pure.

While boys can seek out all kinds of experiences and shake off what they don’t want, girls grow into an understanding that being female means that you are damageable, that your worth is tied up with being seen in the ‘right’ ways (thin, cute, nice, happy, smart without being intimidating, hot without being a slut), the ways that lead, we are told (or sold), to the big expensive wedding, the babies, the Botox, the mommy makeover, the personal trainer, the plastic surgeon.

Have a career if you want, because it’s 2014 after all, but if you stay single and/or childless something is clearly wrong with you, and in any case just remember that you cannot have it all, (so keep yourself sensible and small).

To think that in order to reject that idea of femininity, we also have to reject some essential element of ourselves, other women, female culture. We have to draw that line in the sand and prove that we are not that. We are not ‘girly-girls’. But if that’s what it means to be feminine, to be a heroine, and we are not that, then what, exactly are we?

What are the options?

How can we be the heroes of our own lives without being “pseudo-males”, how can we be heroines without being, you know, heroines? What does it mean to be a female badass? And if we happen to enjoy being ‘girly’, does that mean we can’t be a badass?

“I’d come to see….” writes Carol Lee Flinders, “that at critical junctures language regularly fails women for the simple reason that in male-centered cultures language just isn’t set up to speak for women or carry women’s meanings. This is one of the subtler aspects of the silencing of women.”

We’re silenced not because we’re forbidden to express ourselves (at least in some cases); we’re silenced because the words we need to express or explore different dimensions of our own nature and experience just, well, don’t exist.

So how, then, to describe the ‘female badass’? To invoke female passion, creativity, sensuality, spirituality, authenticity, not to mention the sheer joy of being woman?

I played with the idea of a ‘creatrix’, blogging this:

“My idea of a creatrix was this: a woman who maintains strong relationships with others while cultivating her natural gifts and pursuing mastery, for however long it takes her. She actively uses her gifts in service of herself, her loved ones, and the world. She is grounded, sensual, and comfortable in her body. She recognizes her birthright to pleasure and play. She believes in interdependence and interbeing: she is her own person while knowing that we are at least partly defined by our relationships. She may or may not have kids. Chances are she tried the conventional thing, or came close – the wedding, the ‘safe’ job or career, the house in the suburbs – and it didn’t work out. So now she lives in the country/on the beach/in a loft downtown/in Thailand.

She is not afraid of power: standing up to it, speaking truth to it, or using it to advance her own agenda.

She is not afraid to have an agenda.”

I also came across this quote by Henry David Thoreau: One should be always on the trail of one’s own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine. Finding and then embracing our calling helps bring us to our true self.

That, I thought, is the epitome of badass: to fearlessly live out your “own essential nature” in a way that connects you to meaning, the sacred, and your true self, to feel part of a bigger picture, to be at home in the world.

This is the challenge: this striving, I think, not for happiness so much as for wholeness.

For soul.

And this is where the heroine’s journey comes in.

To be continued

I don’t care if you like it (guest post by Marianne Elliott)

Marianne Elliott is a writer, human rights advocate, and yoga teacher. Brené Brown called her “One of the best teachers I’ve ever experienced … a beautiful writer and a courageous truth teller.” Marianne writes and teaches on creating, developing and sustaining real change in personal life, work and the world.

Last year I spent most of five months travelling through the US, Canada and Europe talking about my book, ZEN UNDER FIRE. At almost every book talk I gave, someone would ask me, ‘Weren’t you afraid to be in Afghanistan, such a dangerous country for women?’

My standard answer was that all countries are dangerous for women.

In Afghanistan I helped document more than 400 case reports of violence against women. They made me sad, mad and sometimes scared. But I also saw that they were not so different from the cases of violence against women I’ve documented or read in New Zealand, or in the US, or Canada, or Australia.

Why make the point about his happening everywhere? Why not just talk about violence against women in Afghanistan?

Because I wanted to own it.

I wanted to avoid the human tendency to want to believe the really ugly shit belongs to some place and someone else. I was saying, ‘This doesn’t only happen over there, it happens here too. It doesn’t only happen to someone else. It happens to us too.’

As my book tour continued, stories kept appearing across the US and Canada. Stories of girls who had been raped, blamed, shamed and shunned. Stories of boys who believed they had done nothing wrong. Stories of entire towns that stood in support of their ‘decent boys’ who had just made a stupid mistake. Stories that were as painful, to me, as anything I’d seen in Afghanistan.

Then I returned to New Zealand to more stories of girls and women being shamed and blamed for being raped. Stories of boys boasting on Facebook about the girls they had raped, and those girls being asked by police officers what they had been wearing at the time, or whether they had been drinking.

At a more subtle level, I saw women being judged for their dress sense, their looks, their figure, who they had or hadn’t slept with. I saw mothers judged for their choices to work, or not to work. When’s the last time any of us heard a man asked why he bothered having children if he was just going to keep on working?

Over and over again I saw that I was living in a world that was often hostile to women.

I asked myself: Where does this come from? How is it allowed to carry on? What can I do about it?

Recently I launched an online campaigning organisation in New Zealand. Last week some of our members suggested we run a campaign in response to a TV host sexualising and trivialising the work of a guest scientist on his TV3 show. Honestly, I was tempted to let it pass.

After all, New Zealand is facing some really big challenges right now, like climate change and child poverty. Puerile sexism masquerading as humour on television seems like an insignificant problem.

Except it’s not, is it?

The host’s question, like my impulse to dismiss it as trivial, is a symptom of a bigger problem. Covert persistent sexualisation of women is a bigger problem for our whole society.

So I drafted up a campaign, and sent it to some wise friends. This was going to be our first campaign, so I wanted to strike the right note. Several of those wise friends came back saying they weren’t sure this was the right topic for our first campaign.

“Don’t you want to launch with a fully heartfelt, well-rounded, affects-all-people action.”

And I knew what they meant. And yet.

Sexism does affect us all.

It took courage to launch with a campaign about sexism. I knew there would be some people in New Zealand asking ‘is this really important enough for my attention?

Yesterday I read this fantastic piece by Rebecca Traister in which she reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from Tina Fey’s BOSSYPANTS:

“Amy Poehler, then new to “Saturday Night Live,” was engaging in some loud and unladylike vulgarity in the writers’ room when the show’s then-star Jimmy Fallon jokingly told her to cut it out, saying, “It’s not cute! I don’t like it!” In Fey’s retelling, Poehler “went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,” forcefully informing him: “I don’t fucking care if you like it.”



The first time I read that scene I remember wondering whether many men would understand why it mattered so much. Why Fallon’s apparently harmless observation earned Poehler’s forceful response. I knew that I understood. As Traister observed:

“I suspect that a lot of this irritation over the small stuff right now is directly related to the fact that we’re mired in a moment at which lots and lots of women are not good … The ease with which women’s choices regarding their bodies, futures, health, sex, and family life are up for public evaluation.”

She had put into words what I’d been trying to explain about our campaign, and why it matters.

It matters because it’s one symptom of a system in which not only do men feel entitled to ask women scientists about their sex lives, they also feel entitled to declare that girls who wear short skirts to parties are ‘asking to get raped’, and decide whether women are able to access safe abortions.

And while it is certainly true that #notallmen enact that entitlement (witness the leader of the Labour Party in New Zealand who recently said that the rate of violence against women in our country made him feel sorry to be a man), it is also true that #yesallwomen have learned to navigate this shitty terrain.

What these smaller incidents reveal, as Traister puts it, is:

“How, in this country, every barometer by which female worth is measured—from the superficial to the life-altering, the appreciative to the punitive—has long been calibrated to “dude,” whether or not those measurements are actually being taken by dudes.”



She was writing about the United States, but the same could certainly be said in New Zealand, and in Australia, and in most of the world. This, above all else, is why I knew we had to find the courage to launch our new organisation with a campaign that some people were not going to like.

This is why I had to put on my best Amy Poehler impression, turn to the world with black eyes and say:

“I don’t fucking care if you like it.”



Because sometimes that’s the bravest thing a woman can say.

Trained as a lawyer, Marianne helped develop human rights strategies for the governments of New Zealand and East Timor, was Policy Advisor for Oxfam, and spent two years in the Gaza Strip before going to Afghanistan, where she served in the United Nations. In Afghanistan, she decided stories were her weapon of choice, and yoga was her medicine.

Marianne’s next round of 30 Days of Courage, an online guide to bravery in action, starts on 4 August. Find out more about the online course here.

the art of praising 42 year old women

I am soon to turn 42.

I’ve been following the backlash to the recent Esquire piece In Praise of 42 Year Old Women, which is pissing off the very women it wants to celebrate .

In 1999 Esquire came out with In Praise of 27 Year Old Women, which didn’t seem to arouse so much ire. I remember a friend of mine – brilliant and culture-savvy – mentioning the piece over the phone with a pleased expression in her voice. She had just turned 27, and as we began to stare down 30 I think we might have been looking for some kind of reassurance that the universe as we knew it wasn’t about to suddenly end.

But somewhere between 27 and 42 you stop looking for that kind of reassurance.

You have a level of self-knowledge that wasn’t possible in your twenties, and along with self-discovery comes greater self-esteem.

A marker of self-esteem, as Gloria Steinem notes in her book REVOLUTION FROM WITHIN, is seeing yourself from the inside-out instead of filtered through the perspective of a hot-or-not culture. It’s the difference between wanting to be wanted, and knowing what you want (and feeling comfortable in your right to go and get it).

It’s the difference between perceiving power as sourced outside of yourself – which primes you to seek external validation – and trusting your natural, inner authority.

Gloria writes:

“No matter who we are, [the journey to self-esteem] follows similar steps: a first experience of seeing through our own eyes instead of the eyes of others (for instance, the moment when an Algerian first looked in defiance at a French soldier, or when a woman stops being defined by the male gaze); telling what seemed to be shameful secrets, and discovering they are neither shameful nor secret (from the woman who has survived childhood sexual abuse to the man whose bottomless need for power hides weakness); giving names to problems that have been treated as normal and thus have no names (think of terms like homophobia, battered women, or Eurocentrism); bonding with others who share similar experiences….

…and finally, achieving a balance of independence and interdependence, and taking one’s place in a circle of true selves.”

I was in a relationship with a man who would let me know if I was wearing something that displeased him. I tended not to mind, because I was interested in his opinion and respected his taste. If I told him I was planning to wear it anyway, he would say, “Okay, but you’re wearing something that I don’t like.”

One afternoon I made a playful comment – I can’t remember what — about his outfit. He ignored me.

“Okay,” I said jokingly, “but you’re wearing something that I don’t like.”

He whirled on me – I was sitting down – and slammed both hands on the table, making it a point to duck his head so that we were eye-to-eye.

He said, “I….don’t…care.”

And I realized that this was about more than appearance, but the balance of power between us. The one with the most power is the one who cares the least. As a woman, I was obligated to care. As a man, he was not.

There’s a kind of universal law that girls learn at a young age: never admit that you are pretty, or else people will think you’re conceited and stuck-up and they will hate you (and assure you that you’re much uglier than you realize). Instead many women share a kind of willed insecurity, cataloging all their physical flaws, deflecting or downplaying compliments.

Learn to beat yourself down in one area, it becomes easier to beat yourself down in others.

Confidence, on the other hand, exudes power (including sexual power); to know that you’re the boss in your own unique and stylish way means you don’t have to seek validation from others (in fact, they might have to seek validation from you).

And power implies that you’re a threat, which is the one thing a woman is not supposed to be.

By the time you’re 42, you’ve wrestled with these issues on some level. Chances are that you’ve figured yourself out for the complex and remarkable creature that you are, and you’ve learned to deeply identify with aspects of your womanliness other than your fuckability (or lack thereof). You’ve learned that giving away your power is a loser’s game; instead of keeping you small and safe, it allows you to get eaten alive. You’ve done this – and keep doing this – despite voices in the culture that would very happily cut you down to size.

Female self-esteem is hardwon – and thus fiercely protected.

Rebecca Traister tells of an anecdote in Tina Fey’s BOSSYPANTS:

“Amy Poehler, then new to “Saturday Night Live,” was engaging in some loud and unladylike vulgarity in the writers’ room when the show’s then-star Jimmy Fallon jokingly told her to cut it out, saying, ‘It’s not cute! I don’t like it!’ In Fey’s retelling, Poehler ‘went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,’ forcefully informing him: ‘I don’t fucking care if you like it.’”

Claiming your personal power doesn’t happen just once, but over and over again, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. You are taking your place in a circle of true selves.

There’s beauty in that, and she doesn’t have to care if you like it.

feed your head + find your soul

“I suppose some of my lyrics owe a debt to those naughty books.” – Cole Porter

My son loves Tintin. He can’t get enough of Tintin. He’s been working his way through all the Tintin books, reading them as fast as I can buy them (I told my boys a long time ago that they could have any book they wanted, as many books as they wanted).

“Tintin is kind of my role model,” he told me.

A friend of mine happened to be in the house during the boys’ daily reading time, and she wondered aloud if my intellectually gifted child shouldn’t be reading “something more challenging than those Tintin books. They’re, like, comic books –“

“Graphic novels,” I said.

“ – whatever. Shouldn’t he be reading real books? I bet he could handle To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“Look,” I said, opening up a box and lifting out the contents, “I got him a Tintin action figure.”

(This same friend would later see me holding the toy figure of a character from Game of Thrones, and ask, “Is that also for your kid?” “Uh, no,” I would admit. “It’s for my desk.”)

I’m perfectly confident that my son can handle ‘real’ books, and that he will come to Mockingbird in his own sweet time – probably for a school assignment – and enjoy it as much as I did (and he and I can then discuss the problematic ‘white redeemer’ trope). And I can’t deny that, hell, I would love to see him, at his age, waving around a copy of The Stranger or Crime and Punishment, mostly so I could brag about it on Twitter.

But the soul wants what it wants.

More than that: the soul knows what it needs.

James Hillman, founder of archetypal psychology and author of books like THE SOUL’S CODE: IN SEARCH OF CHARACTER AND CALLING, compares the soul to an acorn. It may be tiny, but it contains the complete biological blueprint of the particular oak that it will one day become, that it must become. So it is with the soul. This is the very essence of our unique and individual nature that, Hillman argues, can’t be attributed to nature or nurture but is instead an invisible force, a flashing mystery, that hides and weaves through both.

Robert Greene, who has made a study of seduction, power and mastery – and the formidable figures throughout history who serve as examples of each – noted a certain pattern in the lives of passionate high achievers

“…the difference between people who are successful and not are that those who are successful seemed to know from the age of 7 or 8, maybe older, they’re very in tune with what they love. I compare it to a voice inside their head, not literally a voice but something that says “you really are drawn to this subject” and they hear it throughout their lives. For me it was writing and books, since I was a kid. At any time I deviated from that love and went into something else, I was just so unhappy and I knew that I wasn’t doing the right thing. It’s just this voice that keeps drawing you back to what you really, really love.”

This voice.

Socrates referred to it as his ‘daimon’, the deep instinctive sense that pushed him in certain directions and dissuaded him from others. The word ‘genius’ derives from ‘genii’, which the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded as protecting, guiding spirits assigned to individuals at birth to help them through life. These days we refer to it as our intuition, our sixth sense, or – for the more poetically inclined – our muse.

Hillman proposes that we are each bequeathed with a primary image at the heart of our identity, and that it is our life’s task to realize its imperatives. He writes: “Unpacking the image takes a lifetime. It may be perceived all at once, but understood only slowly.”

It will, if we only let it, drive us toward wholeness: when how we live and what we do and who we are converge.

Reading isn’t just about feeding your brain the “proper” intellectual nutrients. It’s a way to map the truth of who you are through discovering what sparks the fire of your imagination, what draws you back over and over. Reading is brain food, but it also serves as soul food. Soul food doesn’t care if its nutrients come from high or low culture, from works of the Western canon or tattered genre paperbacks; it either fits the soul’s appetite, or it doesn’t.

When it fits, we need to pay attention.

My son isn’t reading Tintin in order to avoid more “challenging” material. He sees, in these storylines and characters, the traces of his daimon. He recognizes, on some level unknown to his conscious mind, clues to a soulprint unfolding. It’s not for us to know (at this point) how this influence manifests itself in future. It’s enough to bear witness and call it for what it is: the mystery of who he is, of who we all are, tracking out the truth of our lives.

how to feed your head + find your soul

“I suppose some of my lyrics owe a debt to those naughty books.” – Cole Porter

My son loves Tintin. He can’t get enough of Tintin. He’s been working his way through all the Tintin books, reading them as fast as I can buy them (I told my boys a long time ago that they could have any book they wanted, as many books as they wanted).

“Tintin is kind of my role model,” he told me.

A friend of mine happened to be in the house during the boys’ daily reading time, and she wondered aloud if my intellectually gifted child shouldn’t be reading “something more challenging than those Tintin books. They’re, like, comic books –“

“Graphic novels,” I said.

“ – whatever. Shouldn’t he be reading real books? I bet he could handle To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“Look,” I said, opening up a box and lifting out the contents, “I got him a Tintin action figure.”

(This same friend would later see me holding the toy figure of a character from Game of Thrones, and ask, “Is that also for your kid?” “Uh, no,” I would admit. “It’s for my desk.”)

I’m perfectly confident that my son can handle ‘real’ books, and that he will come to Mockingbird in his own sweet time – probably for a school assignment – and enjoy it as much as I did (and he and I can then discuss the problematic ‘white redeemer’ trope). And I can’t deny that, hell, I would love to see him, at his age, waving around a copy of The Stranger or Crime and Punishment, mostly so I could brag about it on Twitter.

But the soul wants what it wants.

More than that: the soul knows what it needs.

James Hillman, founder of archetypal psychology and author of books like THE SOUL’S CODE: IN SEARCH OF CHARACTER AND CALLING, compares the soul to an acorn. It may be tiny, but it contains the complete biological blueprint of the particular oak that it will one day become, that it must become. So it is with the soul. This is the very essence of our unique and individual nature that, Hillman argues, can’t be attributed to nature or nurture but is instead an invisible force, a flashing mystery, that hides and weaves through both.

Robert Greene, who has made a study of seduction, power and mastery – and the formidable figures throughout history who serve as examples of each – noted a certain pattern in the lives of passionate high achievers

“…the difference between people who are successful and not are that those who are successful seemed to know from the age of 7 or 8, maybe older, they’re very in tune with what they love. I compare it to a voice inside their head, not literally a voice but something that says “you really are drawn to this subject” and they hear it throughout their lives. For me it was writing and books, since I was a kid. At any time I deviated from that love and went into something else, I was just so unhappy and I knew that I wasn’t doing the right thing. It’s just this voice that keeps drawing you back to what you really, really love.”

This voice.

Socrates referred to it as his ‘daimon’, the deep instinctive sense that pushed him in certain directions and dissuaded him from others. The word ‘genius’ derives from ‘genii’, which the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded as protecting, guiding spirits assigned to individuals at birth to help them through life. These days we refer to it as our intuition, our sixth sense, or – for the more poetically inclined – our muse.

Hillman proposes that we are each bequeathed with a primary image at the heart of our identity, and that it is our life’s task to realize its imperatives. He writes: “Unpacking the image takes a lifetime. It may be perceived all at once, but understood only slowly.”

It will, if we only let it, drive us toward wholeness: when how we live and what we do and who we are converge.

Reading isn’t just about feeding your brain the “proper” intellectual nutrients. It’s a way to map the truth of who you are through discovering what sparks the fire of your imagination, what draws you back over and over. Reading is brain food, but it also serves as soul food. Soul food doesn’t care if its nutrients come from high or low culture, from works of the Western canon or tattered genre paperbacks; it either fits the soul’s appetite, or it doesn’t.

When it fits, we need to pay attention.

My son isn’t reading Tintin in order to avoid more “challenging” material. He sees, in these storylines and characters, the traces of his daimon. He recognizes, on some level unknown to his conscious mind, clues to a soulprint unfolding. It’s not for us to know (at this point) how this influence manifests itself in future. It’s enough to bear witness and call it for what it is: the mystery of who he is, of who we all are, tracking out the truth of our lives.

where the light gets in: your flaws + your creative voice

“I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”

― Augusten Burroughs

“I am not an angel,” I asserted; “and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.”

― Charlotte Brontë, JANE EYRE

“This thing about you that you think is your flaw – it’s the reason I’m falling in love with you.”

― Colleen Hoover, SLAMMED

I’ve always been struck by the phraseto find your voice, as if it’s waiting for you to discover it behind the refrigerator or between the couch cushions.

According to psychologist Carol Gilligan, there’s some truth to it. Boys and girls bury their real voice in a personal underground as they learn to adapt and survive in a culture that praises certain behaviors and disdains others.

As kids, we are powerless, and so we construct the False Self, the social mask, that wins us the love – or at least the attention – we desperately need.

One of life’s ironies is that when we’ve pretty much perfected the mask, it becomes just as necessary to our wellbeing not to maintain it, but to smash it.

We need genuine and authentic connection with others. We need to see and be seen.

It’s how we express ourselves – our voice, our style, our creativity – that reveals our inner lives and shows us to others; that makes deep connection possible.

Or not.

Creative expression, however that manifests for you, is not a luxury or frivolity, or a plaything of the professionally privileged, but essential to mental health:

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

― Gospel of Thomas

In their book THE CREATIVITY CURE, Carrie and Alton Barron present creativity as a way of releasing the inner self, allowing for spontaneity and wellbeing.

“When you know, own and use what goes on in the depths of your being – your truth – life is richer and more livable. Your unconscious mind opens up possibilities. By honoring conscious expressions – wisps, clues, clamor, random thoughts, or even conflicts that bubble up from the recesses of your mind – you can feel better and go far.”

The unconscious unnerves us. We’re afraid to “bring forth what is within” because we don’t want to expose the very things that, as children, we believed we needed to hide or disguise in order to be accepted. Our cracks, our flaws, our limitations. Our difference.

But as Marty Neumeier points out, it’s our limitations that help us develop a compelling and original voice:

“It’s the result of working around your shortcomings, using all the aesthetic skills you can muster. Since your limitations are unique to you, your style will also be unique. This is what people find most fascinating about stylish people. They’re uniquely and delightfully themselves.”

Limitations are underrated. Gurus will tell us to dream as if we don’t have any, but creativity loves limits, lives on the edges (and under them and around them), is born out of constraint. Force the human mind to solve a problem, and it will twist itself inside out – make a new connection, uncover a new insight – in order to do so.

Coco Chanel developed her signature style – her very particular point of view – based on what looked good on her. She was slender, boyish, active, in an era when fashion was fitted to a curvaceous ideal. Rather than mold herself to a standard that didn’t suit her, she reinvented it. She draped her flat chest in ropes of fake pearls, wore boxy jackets and slim-hipped skirts, translated the cardigan and the suit from menswear to womenswear. When the only fabric she had to work with was cheap jersey – which was used mostly for making work uniforms for men – she invented the jersey dress, now a fashion classic.

One of my favorite anecdotes is from the making of the movie MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. The script called for horses. The budget had no money for horses. Instead the audience sees the actors skipping down the road while clomping coconut shells together and exchanging dialogue as if this is a totally normal state of affairs. Raise your hand if you found this hilarious — and unique to Python’s style of comedy. (I did. )

If beauty and perfection are universal ideals, it’s the flawed nature of individuals that sets us apart and makes us, dare I say, interesting. It’s the perfect imperfect, a concept that cultures around the world find ways to embrace in their art. Amish quilt makers leave deliberate imperfections in their quilts, as do Turkish carpet weavers. Indian sculptors carve flaws into their statues. The Japanese regard asymmetry and irregularity as a vital component of their aesthetic: beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, incomplete. The Navajo believe that imperfection is the entry point to creativity.

As Leonard Cohen put it, “The crack is where the light gets in.” For the spiritually minded, it’s the place where we open ourselves up – or are broken open – to the divine.

In our attempts to conform – perfectly — to an outside standard, we have to mute our voice and all the flawed beauty that runs through it. “Don’t talk about being true to myself until you are sure to what voice you are being true,” warns Marion Woodman. She links the false self, the social mask, to a personal anger that overlays a universal rage (prose arranged by Jill Mellick):

Nobody ever saw me.

Nobody ever heard me…

When I tried to be myself,

I was told, That’s not what you think,

That’s not what you ought to do.

….I put on a false face.

My life became a lie.

That’s deep rage.

We have lived our lives

Behind a mask.

Sooner or later

If we are lucky

The mask will be smashed

What a relief to be human

Instead of the god or goddess

My parents imagined me to be

Or I imagined them.

Authentic creative expression is the act of smashing the mask. Over and over again.

It is how we let in the light.

10 quick thoughts regarding love + power + badass women

“Power is a kind of love, and love is a kind of power.” — Harriet Rubin

1. The phrase ‘raw feminine power’ surfaced in my thoughts today. I like it, and not just because it makes me think, for whatever reason, of rock sugar crystals, or raw diamonds (responsibly sourced, of course).

2. I’ve been thinking about power in an off-and-on kind of way ever since my therapist told me several years ago that I have an “ambivalent relationship” with power: I was fascinated by it even as I shied away from “claiming” my own. I thought she was making a particular observation about me – what I didn’t realize is how that same statement could be true, in a sweeping generalization kind of way, about women in general. (Gloria Feldt writes deeply about this in her great book NO EXCUSES: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power and teaches the 9 “power tools” in her course on women’s leadership which you can find here. I took the course and can vouch that it is awesome.)

3. I once tweeted a link to a blog post of mine called something like how to be a powerful woman. It got hardly any hits. I tried again, replacing ‘powerful woman’ with ‘female badass’ and the hits went through the roof. (This was, keep in mind, before the word ‘badass’ became so horribly overused.)

As Gloria Feldt discusses in her book, many women don’t like the word power. Feel uncomfortable around it. And yet: we want autonomy, we want to create impact, we want to change the world, we want to self-actualize.

We want to be badasses.

How can any of that happen if we don’t have the power?

And how can we have power if we don’t name it and claim it?

4. We associate power with tyranny, dominance, male dominance, which so many of us have experienced to various degrees on various levels. We think that’s what power looks like. Ergo: in order to claim power, a woman has to act like a man.

But we know on a deep and visceral level that ultimately this doesn’t work, because – big shocker here – a woman isn’t a man. (A great book on this subject is WHAT WORKS FOR WOMEN AT WORK: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know.) What people will accept in a man – an outburst of anger, for instance – they will condemn in a woman, dismissing her as crazy, shrill, a ballbreaker, whatever. This is not exactly productive.

5. I like the idea of power-over vs power-to (again, see Gloria Feldt). Power-over is the power of force, position, authority, intimidation, bullying. (Just writing these words turns my stomach a little.)

It’s my-way-or-the-highway kind of power.

For those of us who have issues with authority, or rebel against ultimatums on point of principle, it’s maybe not the best way to go.

Power-to is the power to reach other people through various forms of partnership: getting on the same wavelength, figuring out how to sync up.

It’s collaboration and inspiration and stepping into a reality where the sum is greater than the parts, where 1 + 1 equals 3.

It’s the power to reach people emotionally as well as intellectually: to access a common dream, to shape a shared vision. It’s the power to reframe. It’s the power to bake a bigger pie. It’s the power to bring out the best and highest selves of others – and, not least, of yourself. It’s the power to light up a room with your presence alone, and not because you’re an A-lister with fabulous hair. It’s the power to make other people feel good.

6. Power can be used for good or evil, but in and of itself, it is neutral. Just because some people use power to commit acts of genocide, doesn’t mean that others can’t use it to feed a starving village, to educate the female population of a third-world country, to take down human traffickers.

Power corrupts, but it can also lift up.

7. Traditionally, women have been ‘allowed’ two kinds of power: the power of sexuality – a.k.a. “pussy power” – and the power of shopping. If women seek power in other ways – in the corporate world, in politics, in the military, or even certain kinds or relationships with certain kinds of men – the culture finds ways to, quote-unquote, “put them in their place”, possibly by accusing her of being “power-hungry”.

No one to my knowledge has ever accused a woman of being “power-hungry” when she puts on heels and a Herve Leger minidress. A sexy appearance will make a woman feel powerful, but let’s face it: being superhot isn’t enough to change the world. Otherwise a Dick Cheney would be busting his ass in the gym and undergoing plastic surgery to bring out his inner Brad Pitt.

8. What does a powerful woman look like, sound like? Do we know? It’s okay for men to be powerful because we expect that of them; it is, in many ways, and deeply unfair ways, the measure of their manhood.

We expect women to be warm.

As John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut observe in their book COMPELLING PEOPLE: The Hidden Qualities that Make Us Influential, the problem with power is that it cuts against warmth. We love people or we fear them. To love and fear someone is unusual.

Men who can combine great power with great warmth are not just respected, but revered: Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi. Women who can combine power and warmth are also revered: Oprah. But whereas men can lead on power alone, women must combine power and warmth, at least to some degree, just to stay in the game. Hillary Clinton did not become the powerhouse she is today until she learned to give out chocolate chip cookie recipes, show tears on camera, stand by her man’s infidelity.

9. Perhaps the big lesson here, the silver lining, is this: you don’t have to choose between power and love. Because I think what holds us back, in so many subtle and not-so-subtle ways (and this is true for both genders) is the fear of not being loved – even, or especially, if we can barely recognize the love in our lives in the first place.

Men learn that they won’t be loved if they’re not powerful.

Women learn that they won’t be loved if they are powerful.

Except some women — as Harriet Rubin observes in her book THE PRINCESSA — fail to learn this.

They are the women who go down in history.

10. I like the term ‘raw feminine power’ because we’re still unearthing it, mining it, holding it up to the light. We’ re still cutting and shaping and polishing it: our sense for it, our ideas of it.

We feel it in our bones, our womanly bones.

It isn’t what they told us it would be. It has nothing to do with fabulous footwear (although a pair of Jimmy Choos is never a bad thing). It is not the man on the horse – or in the Porsche – who arrives (or doesn’t) to take us away from it all.

It is bigger, and bolder, and so much more sacred.

It is light and fire, yes, but it is also soul and shadow, and our willingness to let ourselves get big, to sink our roots into the earth as we reach into the sky.

It is our ability to bridge the distance, to bring opposites together, to fight for love, to be warriors of spirit. We are raw and unrefined, we are mighty, and our voice is as big as our heart.

We are awakening.

We are just getting started.

your style is your soulprint (or: why perfect cleavage isn’t enough)

“Amid the chaos of that day, when all I could hear was the thunder of gunshots, and all I could smell was the violence in the air, I look back and am amazed that my thoughts were so clear and true, that three words went through my mind endlessly, repeating themselves like a broken record: you’re so cool, you’re so cool, you’re so cool.”



– movie quote from TRUE ROMANCE (Quentin Tarantino)

The first time I ever went to a black-tie event in LA, I was blown away by how beautiful the women were.

There was so much female beauty, it started to blur together. That was the second thing I noticed: the women kind of looked alike (at least to a visitor from the Bay Area, where the glam factor is not so prominent and plastic surgery not quite so de rigueur). It was as if they were all vaguely related.

In that sea of snug designer dresses and perfect cleavage, one woman stood out. Bobbed black hair, a long skirt, boots, turquoise jewelry. She made it all work in a way that would be difficult to copy – it wasn’t a look lifted from a magazine or taken off a storefront mannequin or dictated by a stylist. It was uniquely her, matched to her body type and telling a story of personality unlike anything else in that room.

It was, I realize now, my first real lesson in the art of differentiation: how to set yourself apart, how to get noticed in the crowd (and the crowded marketplace).

You can fit yourself into the same category as everyone else.

Or you can strike out in a direction based on your own instincts, knowledge and self-knowledge – and how you choose to apply that knowledge.

This is otherwise known as your voice. Your creative DNA. Your artistic signature.

Your personal style.

As Marty Neumeier points out in THE 46 RULES OF GENIUS, having good style is not the same as good taste. Good taste has an objective element, a universal sense of “how aesthetics can make a designed object or outcome more of what it should be, and less of what it shouldn’t.”

You can’t buy good taste.

You can develop an instinctive feel for it – without necessarily knowing how to explain it – or come to it through a more conscious study of aesthetics.

Style, on the other hand, is highly personal. If taste concerns what you know, style is how you apply that knowledge and express it to the world.

Sometimes it’s enough to be excellent. You’re the smartest kid in your school, the best-looking kid in your town. But what happens when you seek to prove yourself in a lecture hall at Harvard or a casting call in Los Angeles?

What happens when everybody has good taste? When excellence is just enough to get you in the room?

We are biologically wired to respond to novelty. We notice what’s different, what’s unusual, what’s freshly arrived in our environment. (How many great stories start with some variation of “a stranger comes to town”?)

The more generic something is, the more our eyes skip over it.

One of the first things you learn when you learn to write fiction is the importance of the particular and meaningful detail. You can’t get at the universal human condition through cliché and vagueness and generalities, but through the depiction of the highly personal.

We not only notice difference, we see ourselves reflected in it –

– when, that is, it is relevant to us. When it resonates.

(This is why memoir and confessional poetry can be such popular genres, despite accusations of their writers being self-absorbed and/or narcissistic.)

Style, then, is how you tell the story of yourself to the world: not just in how you dress, but how you do what you do and make what you make. Style is your soulprint, your own creative twist on things. It is not some clever affectation that others can copy, but an ever-evolving expression of your passage through the world.

It is your specific and highly developed point of view.

Truth is beauty, and beauty is truth.

Good style is authentic. It is true to who you are.

It resonates.

As a mother once told her daughter, “You can be beautiful, darling. But make it a point to be so much more.”

Master what you need to master.

Then raise it to the level of magic by being fully and truly yourself.