In my heart, I think we need a reminder.

Brave

“Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, and imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of a competence.” - Eleanor Roosevelt

Every once and a while I come back to this, and I cannot help but feel energized again, just by the words of great and daring people.

Life can feel so dull when we're not really living it. Our God tells us he cares for us so intimately so that we can live life to the fullest - without worry, poured out for others, and blending the spirit and the material in a beautiful pattern.

It doesn't matter who you are or where you are, life to the fullest is there to be grasped.

Lake Massapoag

Today instead of heading to the Blue Hills, S and I tried out another spot in nature not too far from us - Lake Massapoag in Sharon, Mass.

The weather today was magnificent, absolutely perfect. It was sunny, 71 degrees Fahrenheit, with cool breezes and low humidity. Other than a few fisher people and a random assortment of other couples hiking, it was a deserted place surrounded with kids' day camps that have yet to open for the summer.

We took a short walk around a span of the lake, played frisbee in an open clearing by one of the camps, and relaxed as we overlooked the Lake for a while, taking it in and enjoying our time.

On days like this, it is easier to appreciate the presence of God all around - in the air, in the trees, even in the simple actions we take that just seem lighter because of how gorgeously the day has come together.

I tell him, "Real."

Many people in the world of pop culture are ramping up for the premiere of The Hunger Games movie by comparing the upcoming franchise to the Twilight Saga. While comparisons are inevitable, they’re also focused on all the wrong stuff. Let me tell you why.

Critics think Bella is weak and passive. This may be because she is absolutely in love with her partner and agonizes over how her choice to be with him, and to take on a dramatically different life for herself, will affect those others she loves.

Critics think Katniss is strong and assertive. This could be because she is a hunter by trade and because she is not originally in love with her eventual partner, at least not assuredly or with full consciousness.

http://silivrenstar.deviantart.com/art/Bella-Swan-98917113

In the major character arc of Twilight, Bella achieves relative self-actualization through a series of life choices, including but not limited to her choice to marry a man, her choice to have a baby, and her choice to reconcile those she loves from her old life with her new one. In The Hunger Games, Katniss is a survivalist throughout. In order to ultimately find a measure of balance in her life, she marries a man who can provide her with the warmth, optimism and sense of security that she herself lacks. Critics will go on and on about how Katniss is independent and how Bella is codependent, but on the last page of both epics, neither women are less than an arm’s length away from their lovers.

I think Katniss and Bella are both potential role models for young women, and young people in general, who are developing their senses of self. I also think at times that both of them stink as role models. Both are hideously selfish at times, but at other times, downright self-sacrificial. Both are warrior women, who hone their own talents, and stand up for what they believe.

But Katniss is lauded and Bella is shamed in a world where strength is often defined using the wrong terms. Bella’s strength is her ability to make her own decisions and to pave her own way. She decides to move to Forks. She decides to remain loyal to Edward. She decides to become a vampire, and she decides to keep and defend her child. To say that Bella’s love and focus on relationships throughout her journey of self-actualization are inescapable weaknesses (like so many critics do) is to discount the forces of love and relationship in life, and that’s just bogus. Love is the most powerful force of creation, and relationships are the most powerful way to give and receive love. It is love that makes Bella keep her child, love that draws her to bring warring factions to peace, and love that causes her to create a destiny that pulls together the most important people in her life.



http://patsie.deviantart.com/art/Katniss-Everdeen-209831277

I contest too that Katniss is in love with Peeta throughout the entire book series, but that she suppresses that love out of fear of vulnerability and fear of dealing with the consequences of that emotion. This is not a particularly healthy example for young people. Instead, I believe that Katniss is strongest not in the ways critics are talking about – when she uses a bow and arrow and becomes the face of a revolution – but when she stops acting like a conniving contestant on Survivor and is also moved by love. When she sacrifices herself for her sister. When she mourns Rue. When she comforts Peeta and allows him to give her his comfort. We see Katniss moved overtly by love less often than Bella is, but it’s with love as strength that the people who think they have a handle on these stories aren’t too comfortable.

I adore both of these series. They are both creative, moving stories about women that were both so much fun to read. Both cause me to think about the world in different ways, despite having read them purely for recreation. I think both Bella and Katniss are new and interesting and positive forces in the literary world. So while the comparisons will not stop, I wish they would take on a tone that grants both characters their unique personhood without judgment. Because these two women do not need to compete with each other. They are both warriors. They are both mothers. They are both wives. And they both, in their own ways, define who they are for themselves.

A note on silliness:

Some might think it is stupid to review tween fiction and even stupider to attempt to provide a critical analysis of the pop-culture drama surrounding tween books made into mainstream movies. I disagree.

“Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.” - Jessamyn West

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.” - Simone Weil

“You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.” - Rita Dove

Done well

If I am old to give some semblance of advice – and in my late twenties I am certainly starting to feel old, no matter how many of you laugh – my advice would be: Women need to view themselves as competent. I believe that a large part of my success in life (and by success I mean setting goals that I attain, and not any other measure) is knowing that I am capable.

There have been times in life, many times, when I approached a problem or task or concept much differently than others would have. I have been blessed to grow up with people who believe in me, and to have found people who I can relate to, to emulate, when learning to be my best. Not all of these people are women, but certainly many of them are. I say this, because I feel like we all need to find our own way of mastering skills and information as we grow, and we need to feel comfortable doing it our way, by trusted role models who either remind us of ourselves or who, at the very least, are supportive of how we are finding our way.

Entering the teenage and adult world, things change a bit. Though idealized gender roles and stereotypes are always present in our lives, as we get older we start to have to deal with these perceptions independently. This can be a positive thing, so long as we can hold our own and we have healthy self images and images of others as equal persons with equal value. But in the workforce or in adult domestic life, it can be hard to think of men and women as equally valuable.

There was a controversy recently about a European clothing company that marked the washing instructions of a pair of men’s pants with the phrase “Give it to your woman.” At home, we can get the impression that men are no good at performing domestic tasks like cooking, cleaning and organizing. This impression belittles men who enjoy and excel at these tasks, and in a society where men are still viewed as more capable than women at most things, it also regulates these domestic activities and their primary agents – still women – to lesser roles in society. Likewise, women learn from their world not to be good at traditionally male tasks of the home, like servicing the car, in such a way that promotes stereotypes, and even worse, discrimination. As if you are uniquely smart and valuable if you can fix the lawn mower, but somehow less intelligent or needed if you can fix the pot roast.

In my experience, I have found something to be true in the workforce. Men at work are often successful at tasks, or in accomplishing goals, using skills and habits and methods that I do not normally use and with which I might not be successful. Some women I know work quite differently from me too, but in an environment where I aspire to leadership, and most of the leaders are men, I must look to them by default. And in these situations, I have to believe in myself. Others will doubt me when I do things in certain ways that seem unorthodox, simply because the only people who did these same things before me were men, who did them in similar ways to one another, and who belong to an unspoken club where their successes and failures are understandable and therefore acceptable to one another, while mine are foreign. 

In this environment, which is no more hostile to women than any other workplace, I must maintain my belief in myself, because women my age are encountering tricky territory in the workforce. We are women who grew up knowing we could be lawyers, but who still expected most lawyers to be men. We are women who anticipated being able to be a mom and work outside of the home, but who still have to think about balancing this lifestyle so much more than our male counterparts do. 

When people imagine somehow that there is now true gender equality in our world, a person who actually operates as if there is true equality (for instance, that there is something inequitable about their law firm when it’s not made up of 51% women, 49% men, with a woman just as likely to be leading the firm as a man) gets met with resistance and the opinion that she is militant, delusional, and aggressive, or, if that person is a man, that he is soft and a hippie. In this situation, repeated over again in different ways as we grow up, women tend to accept incomplete levels of equality. We can then start to see ourselves as inferior, as opposed to seeing the reality that we are still discriminated against structurally, and often times, personally. Met with these circumstances, women tend to underestimate their abilities over time, and men tend to overestimate theirs, as if they are responsible for the privileges or pit falls that societal gender equality has put into their lives. 

One solution to this for women is to believe in themselves! Not too much, not too little, but with a clear perspective of one’s skills, talents, and ability to contribute and lead in life. If I waited for permission go forward in my life from those who have traditionally paved the way, my growth would be severely limited, as would be the evidence that I am competent in my own way, and increasingly so. 

So let’s be real with ourselves, find relatable mentors who cheer us, and never look to a man, another woman, or anyone besides ourselves and our Creator, to design and birth our success.

Back to Blue

So we haven’t been eaten by coyotes yet, but we are back in the Blue Hills after a much abbreviated winter that was so much different than the last. Remember last winter? During our first walk around the pond, it was still frozen! This time around there’s no need for boots, because there is no snow anywhere, and in the sunshine it’s nice and warm. How things change.

While not wanting the snowboarding season to be over (it is here, though maybe we’ll get to Vermont if we’re lucky), to be back hiking in the woods of Milton is a little bit like coming home. I can’t believe it was 2009 when I first set foot in these woods and would come here to take a break from work, or to meditate, or to jog, all by myself since S didn’t live here yet. Since then S and I often carve out time on the weekends just to catch up with a walk through the woods, and it one of my favorite traditions with him.

Being in the Blue Hills connects me to what little time I get out in our neighborhood, it connects me to the water, and gives S and I that time to talk and also goof around a little, amongst the families and kids and puppies and occasionally a terrifying Canadian goose. Oh look, there's one behind me now.

Everyone should have a space in nature to recharge, and I am so thankful for mine.

Just another weekend

Sleeping in late

Driving around town

Keeping watch for coyotes?

I guess spring has a few surprises in store for us.

March Madness

Welcome to March! I kicked off the month with four nearly consequetive airline flights from Baltimore to Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale, to Atlanta again, and then, on a 12-2am red eye back to the land of snow and freezing raining, back to good old Boston.

Pros to this scenario include an airport meal voucher for a McDonald's chocolate milkshake and catching up with two of my favorite work people. Cons are squarely the feeling one gets on her fourth flight in 24 hours after midnight tens of thousands of miles above the earth during a torrential rainstorm in seat 9B.

17 hours in Fort Lauderdale -

5 sleeping, 6 training, 1 driving, 4 at the airport and 1 hour for a glorious walk on the beach.

The winter is almost over. Part of me is excited for swimming, hiking and running and the less insanity-filled work days that lie ahead April through August. Part of me worries that the Blue Hills Ski Area will close any day now, and I'll be beside myself missing what little snow there actually was this year.

Life really does speed by, and all we can do is make sure we get sand in our winter boots whenever possible.