by Heather Plett | Mar 9, 2010 | art, Beauty, grace, journey
He stood there. Naked and unflinching. Stared at by a dozen eager art students. Each of them trying to capture the curve of his belly, the shadow between his butt cheeks, and every flaw and imperfection on his face. Not even a hint of shame appeared – not a wince, not a clenched muscle in his jaw, not a discrete turning to hide any part of his body – he simply posed as the instructor told him.
It seemed fitting and somewhat ironic that in the middle of this particular journey that will lead me (in just 2 days) to lie beneath the surgeon’s knife and give up a part of my own profile, I was sitting in an art studio staring at a naked man.
What did his nudity have to do with my upcoming surgery? Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about the human body in recent weeks. Trying to come to terms with how I feel about my own body. Trying to determine just what my personal body image is. Trying to hold each of the body-related thoughts along this journey captive while I examine what they mean and how their stories shape me.
I have never been very comfortable with my own nakedness. I dress quickly when I emerge from the shower, never stopping to look at myself in the mirror. Even before the children were born, I couldn’t leave the bedroom unless fully clothed. Much to my husband’s chagrin, I wear pajamas to bed and cannot sleep unless I am dressed. Taking the above photo was one of the most awkward things I’ve ever done.
I don’t want to be naked. I don’t want to be reminded of my flaws and imperfections. I don’t want to see the way one heavy breast hangs nearly an inch lower than the other, or the way the cellulite bubbles on my hips. If I keep it all covered, I can pretend I don’t hear the screams of “unworthy” sounding off in my head.
Years ago, there was an artist visiting the Winnipeg Folk Festival who was displaying the most beautiful sculptures of pregnant women. I longed to be sculpted by him, to be made beautiful in my nakedness at the hands of an artist. But I wasn’t pregnant at the time. He told me how difficult it was to find women who were willing to model for him. He gave me his card and said if I were ever pregnant again, I should call him.
I was pregnant again. Twice. But I didn’t call. Part of me ached for it – wanted it so badly. But part of me couldn’t get past the shame and awkwardness of knowing someone would see my every flaw. I don’t even like the way my husband stares at me when I’m naked, how could I let an artist do it?
In two days, I’m having breast reduction surgery. You might be thinking “perhaps you should get your body image issues in order before you do that” and maybe you’d be right. But the truth is, this feels like the right time for me. It feels like something I need to do to feel more free and alive in my body. That might seem messed up, but it’s my truth and it’s the journey I’ve chosen.
It’s about having the freedom to run down the street without holding my chest tight with one of my arms. It’s about not feeling the ache in my shoulders or back. It’s about not having the underwire cut into my ribs under the weight. It’s about being able to buy a “normal” bra and not being told by the sales clerk for the umpteenth time “we don’t have anything in YOUR size”.
Will it make me feel more comfortable with my nudity? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure it won’t be a cure-all, but maybe it will help me take baby steps. And maybe someday, a little further along the journey, I’ll let an artist sculpt me, flaws and all.
As I got lost in the meditative act of outlining and shading the muscles, the bum, the groin, and the slightly drooping stomach of our model last night, I couldn’t help but sit in awe at the wonder of the human body. It’s a beautiful thing, this mass of sculpted muscles, skin, hair, sagging bellies, protruding birthmarks, imperfect lips – all of it. We are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made. In the likeness of our Creator.
Even me.
by Heather Plett | Mar 8, 2010 | India
It’s International Women’s Day. There are days when I get complacent and think “what’s the point of a day like today? Haven’t we succeeded in changing our place in society? Do we still need a day to mark the need for change?” And then all I need to do is remember that day in India, and I know that we (the global “we” that recognizes that what hurts a young woman in India hurts me) still have so far to go.
(following is a re-post)
The List of the Missing
Pharmin Khatun, age 16, missing. Manila Purkite, age 14, missing. Raksha Khatun, age 11, missing.
Pages and pages of names. Listed under the current status for most of them was one word – “missing”. Only one or two on each page said “restore” or “rescue”.
Each name represented a young girl missing from the villages we visited in Mandir Bazer, West Bengal, India. All of them were presumed to have been taken to the big cities and forced into the sex trade.
Lost in the never-ending grip of poverty, families in the region look for whatever hope they can find to help them survive. Girls are expendable. Girls cost money. Girls require dowries when they reach marriageable age.
A trustworthy-looking man visits the village and tells the family, “Send your daughters with me. I will take them to the city and help them find good jobs. Then they can send money home to their families. Your lives will all be improved. Trust me.”
They trust him and send off their girls. Fourteen year old girls. Eleven year old girls. Girls just like the three carefree daughters I would be going home to in a week’s time.
The young and dedicated staff of HASUS sat around the table and told us stories of the girls they were trying to find and rescue. They showed us the home they were building to house those that were lucky enough to be found and returned to the village. We met a deaf girl who had little chance of survival except for the compassion of the staff of HASUS. We met some of the young women who were part of a retraining program – learning sewing skills so that at least they would be employable. In most cases, their families don’t want them back when they return as damaged goods.
Learning sewing skills
Two years later I am still shaken by the horror of giving up my daughter because the poverty wraps me so tightly in a cocoon I can’t imagine any other way out.
How can we change the world so that THEY have a chance to celebrate International Women’s Day?
by Heather Plett | Mar 7, 2010 | Uncategorized
Two years ago, I was lucky enough to be in Bangladesh for the Hindu Holi festival in March. It’s a day when people chase each other around with coloured water or powder and splash it on each other in a gleeful cacophony of colour. By the end of the day, everyone is as colourful as these boys (whose shirts started the day white). This picture was taken from a small boat while we were floating down a canal. These boys were chasing the boat, hoping to baptize us in colour.
I think at this time of year, Holi would be the perfect festival to adopt in North America. Think about it – all of that grey slushy slow that no longer looks pristine and white like it did a month ago, would be transformed into a burst of random colour. And all of those grey, black, and brown winter coats that we can’t put away just yet, because March is too unpredictable, would now be pink and purple and brilliant blue.
I don’t know about you, but this is the time of year that I most desperately start craving colour.
Postscript: It just occurred to me that the day this picture was taken followed the hardest night. Which is a rather fitting metaphor, isn’t it? After the darkness comes the dawn? After the bed bugs/wild dogs/cockroaches/diarrhea comes the day when you float down a canal with young laughing boys trying to douse you in colour? After the unholy night comes Holi day?
And today I have to remember, after winter, comes SPRING!
by Heather Plett | Mar 4, 2010 | art, journey, prayer
Monday was not a good day. I’d slept about 3 hours the night before, I was grumpy and frustrated about the bad news my daughter had received, and nothing had gone my way all day. I survived the day at work, but was not in the right frame of mind to go to my drawing class in the evening. Almost every cell of my body was screaming “just go home to bed – no need to go to EVERY class.” And yet I knew I would regret missing it and something told me it was just the right thing to do when I was feeling the way I was.
So I dragged myself to class. The first half hour was really bad. We had a visiting instructor, and she just wasn’t teaching the way we were used to being taught. For one thing, she wasn’t willing to give demonstrations, and said “no, I want to see what comes out of you without trying to imitate me.” That pissed me off and I almost got up and walked out.
I was trying to get the shading right on a nose, and it just wasn’t working. At all. I fought tears. What’s the point? I can’t draw. I’m wasting my time.
I gave up on the first drawing and started another. And then another. And then slowly, in my third attempt, something shifted. My breath slowed and I felt the frustration slowly seep from my body. Like osmosis. Gradually I entered that special meditative space where nothing else mattered but the paper, the charcoal in my hand, and my presence at the page.
Have you felt it? I’m sure you have. Call it zen, call it flow, call it prayer, call it meditation – call it whatever you like, but when you feel it you KNOW. It’s a mystical, spiritual thing that changes you, that heals you, and that shifts the icky stuff that’s stuck in you.
This past year it’s become more and more clear to me that this is the role art plays for me. I don’t ever intend to be a “serious” artist, but art has become a special touchstone for me, a spiritual practice. It’s how I meditate and pray, and more often than not, I walk away from the page with some deeper understanding of something I didn’t even know I needed an answer for.
For an upcoming retreat, I’ve been asked to put together a special station where people can spend time in quiet reflection and prayer while doing art & collage. It’s not a workshop, so there will be no instruction, but I’m putting together a page of instructions to leave at the table for those who want to engage. Here’s what I’ve prepared so far. Feel free to play along in your own home.
1. Before you begin, spend a few moments in stillness. Take deep breaths and try to free your mind of whatever baggage you brought to the table. Invite the Spirit to sit with you and to create with you. Inhale. Exhale. Open yourself to whatever wisdom or blessings you may receive (even if that blessing is simply a chance to be still and quiet for awhile in your busy life.)
2. Do not approach this as “a work of art that needs to be mastered”. This is meant for your eyes only and does not need to be shared. Think of it as your personal prayer or meditation, between you and God. Set aside your perfectionism or ideas about “what art should look like”.
3. Begin with a clean sheet of paper or art journal. It’s up to you how you fill that page. You can doodle randomly, splash bold colours on it, or cover it with images from a magazine – anything that feels right for you.
4. If you choose to collage, flip through a few magazines. Don’t look for specific images or words. Instead, pick whatever moves you at that particular moment. It might be photos, random words, or a combination. Either tear or cut them out and collect them without giving too much deliberate thought to what they mean or how they connect with each other.
5. Play with the images for awhile, arranging and rearranging them on the page, folding them, tearing edges off, whatever you like.
6. Once you’re ready, begin gluing them on the page in an arrangement that feels right for you, using mod podge and foam brushes. You may also want to brush mod podge over the top of the images.
7. Add paint, marker, glitter, or anything you like to the page. Sometimes the best way to connect with what’s on your page is to finger paint on it, meandering to different parts of the page with your finger, and feeling the various textures as you do so. Paint over some images if you like, or just paint between them.
8. Your mind will wander to many places while you do this, and that’s okay, let it wander. This is not about trying to corral your mind, but rather allowing it to freely connect with the images and with the Spirit that is with you in this space.
9. When you are done, sit back and reflect on what is on the page. Some of the images may surprise you. There may be themes you didn’t expect would emerge. There may be combinations of photos that communicate something to you. Be open to whatever you receive.
10. However, don’t put any pressure on yourself to see or interpret something on the page. Sometimes the value is just in the stillness and the meditative act, not in the final result. On the other hand, sometimes you’ll only notice something a few hours or even a few days later, once you come back to the page.
11. You may wish to whisper a silent prayer, but it’s really not important that any words be spoken. Remember that God is quite capable of hearing your thoughts even before they’re put into words, and quite capable of communicating to you in a deeper way than you could express in words.
by Heather Plett | Mar 3, 2010 | journey, Uncategorized
Here’s the thing… too much navel-gazing gets old after awhile, right? Even when it’s ME doing the navel-gazing. Smile.
You’ve done it too, haven’t you – clicked on somebody’s blog (probably mine now and then), realized that it was one of those long-winded navel-gazing posts, and then clicked away looking for something more entertaining? Yeah, go ahead and admit it – I won’t take it personally – even my husband admits to skipping some of my posts.
With so many thousands (millions?) of blogs out there, there’s a LOT of navel-gazing on the internet. Sometimes it seems like everyone (yes, myself included) has become egocentric and ethnocentric in their search for the right self-help book, the right guru, the right yoga practice, the right set of 400 thread count sheets, the right “10 steps to self-actualization”, and the right “dreams-for-my-personal-future”.
The thing is, if all of those things aren’t balanced with compassion, justice, and RESPONSIBILITY, well then everybody loses but ME, ME, ME! And how happy will we be if we’re lonely in that perfect self-actualized bubble we’re living in?
So… after that rant, you’re probably thinking I’m ditching all that stuff and just preaching a “live a life of total sacrifice and self-deprivation, and don’t do anything to improve yourself” message, right?
Well, ironically, that’s not the case. Because I actually do believe there is value in self-discovery, IF it is done in the spirit of “if I give of my best, and challenge myself to recognize and share what I have, then I am serving the people around me as well as myself and we’ll all be better off for it”. Contentment begets contentment. Compassion begets compassion. Self-respect begets respect for others. Pay it forward. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A happier me is a happier you. You get what I’m saying.
I’m beginning to understand that the season of Lent is actually partly about digging deeper to understand ourselves better and, as a result, figuring out how to be what we are called to be. Here’s a quote from Frederick Buechner that inspired me recently…
In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year’s income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year’s days. After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves…To hear yourself answer (such a question) is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end of it.
Asking ourselves the questions that Christ asked himself, and facing the temptations that Christ faced (to let pride, greed, and the desire for power become his guiding energy) are all part of becoming who we are meant to be. It’s about figuring out how we are meant to serve the world.
Christ was about to face the ultimate test of his calling (his own sacrificial death), but before he was ready for that, he had to spend some time alone in the desert. I’m sure that wasn’t popular with his followers who probably thought it was unfair of him to desert them. (How could somebody lead and inspire us and then ditch us?!) But he knew that if he didn’t do this, then his calling would not be fulfilled and his followers would suffer more in the long run then the pain they felt in the short term.
In the end, Christ and all humanity benefits when Easter comes and there is resurrection and redemption.
That’s not about navel-gazing, that’s about finding strength in who we are gifted to be, even when it’s not popular with the people who don’t want to see us change or step away from them.
This poem (via Christine) says it well…
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.
– Mary Oliver
