The Tail Wagging The Dog...

... another of my pet peeves...

Any company or brand expecting you to pay to wear their logos...

Tell me again - why should I do that?

Ought it not to be the other way around, where you pay me to wear, carry, drive your products - seeing I'm a walking advertisement for you???

It used to bug my children that I wouldn't buy branded, labelled products...

They felt left out, when they compared themselves to their peers...

I did occasionally succumb, but to the smallest degree possible...

When my daughters were in primary school, Benetton and Esprit entered the New Zealand clothing market...

My daughters went to a suburban school that had a high socio-economic population and most of their friends were wearing both brands within a matter of weeks of their launch in the country...

Knowing how much peer pressure around body image and popularity affected young girls especially, I gave both girls socks with the Benetton and Esprit brands woven into the tops...

They were so happy; they felt like they were part of the 'in crowd', normal, equals, accepted...

It was a small thing to do to make life a little easier for daughters who have a mother who doesn't fit the mould...

And I had a hard time giving in to the programming, on even that scale...

And this doesn't even address the issues relating to slave labour being employed in Third World countries to make these products and the unholy profits manufacturers are making on the backs of this exploitation...

My mother worked for most of her life in the clothing industry.  I saw how hard she worked and how little she was paid, even in a western factory.   I know the cost of the materials, of marketing and distribution etc...

Why on earth would I want to pay more to be used as a walking billboard to market a label, which, in itself has no substance in reality, is nothing more than an illusion?

 

Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide...

The all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing fascist plutarchy... fact or fantasy?

An Act Of God...

Saturday morning...

Surrounded by stuff, some in boxes, more waiting to be packed up and moved...

Thank god it doesn't all have to be done in one day, though it would make the utmost practical sense to get it over and done with...

Stuff...

Hate it...

It needs caring for, cleaning...

 - though cleaning could be considered an act of genocide, with each swipe of the cloth killing billions of microbes!

It takes up energy, time, attention, space...

It cramps my style - I can't just get up and go whenever an amazing opportunity for new adventure comes along...

It's a ball and chain around my ankle...

I want to do what I challenged others to do on a Facebook thread about the global energy/food crisis and our own personal responsibility in that - reduce all my possessions down to 20% of what I have now, and live in a space that is 20% of  what we now occupy...

Better yet - give it all away and walk the earth with nothing but a begging bowl, doing what I can where I can...

 Stuff...

Love it...

It gives me a 3D sense of continuity, of travelling my life path, of connections I've made, places I've been, people I love and who love me...

I've got a gift for 'arranging' it, decorating houses, creating warm, inviting, calm spaces that people tell me are like a "sanctuary" and they say they wish they could do what I do...

It brightens my world with beauty and light, with imagination and memory, with colour, texture and sound... 

- though I'm surrounded by that in every dimension, in all of the eternal now, if I have eyes to see and the awareness to be awake to it...

In some weird way, it makes me real, solid, in 3D... 

Or I think it does...

As though my stuff is me?

Who am I without my stuff?

Would I cease to exist?

Would I have existed at all, if I don't leave any stuff behind as evidence?

- and does any of my stuff mean anything to anyone else, or will it just be nuisance clutter, to be given away, dumped, discarded, after I cease to be physical?

 

When I took my first family of kids to live in Australia in 1996, we were without our 'stuff' for more than three months.

Through some mistake, our own 'stuff' sat in a container on a wharf for that time, instead of being shipped to Brisbane.

So I had to rent and buy basic household necessities while we waited for our 'stuff'...

Three months without art, music, books, knick-knacks, personal items filling the space we were inhabiting...

We didn't miss it at all...

And then the boxes etc were delivered and there was the fun of unpacking and remembering and choosing where things would sit/fit best energetically...

And in a week or two, it was all being taken for granted again, a backdrop to the routine of living... 

In many ways a limited and limiting definition of who we were, as individuals and as a family...

A self-created prison... a mask, a facade, a half truth and a half lie of who we are that we present to ourselves and project out to the world...

My higher Self wants to let it all go...

My small self wants to hold on...

I would not grieve if an Act of God destroyed all our earthly possessions...

Do I have the will and strength to be that Act of God?

Do I have the right to make this choice for my son?

Grief & Roses...

It was complete synchronicity that I wrote yesterday about feminine beauty past and present, using photos of French model Isabelle Caro to exemplify how far the pendulum has swung into the realms of unhealthy and horrible...

I didn't even know her name, or the names of the other young women pictured.

And today I read the headlines that she had died (in November)... At the age of 28, after a 15-year journey through the hell of anorexia...

Synchronicity?   Was I "tuned in" to other energy fields and picking up what was going on in her life?

Whatever, I feel sad for Isabelle in what she must have endured... and sad that an artificial world, the creation mostly of men, enabled her in that torturous and tortuous travail...

These roses are for Isabelle and all the women - young and old - who have felt so unloved and unaccepted/unacceptable that they fought their minds, bodies and spirits to become someone/something else...