The Beauty In Nature (2009)
Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.—Golda Meir
[one_half padding=”4px 0 px 0 4px”]Over the years, I think more has been written about the self than any other topic. Self-worth, self-esteem, self-identity, self-loathing, self-love, and self-help are all topics that have lined bookshelves and stores as long as humans have put ink on parchment. We are very concerned about ourselves and have little difficulty discussing ourselves endlessly, especially now that we have social media so that we can broadcast every ridiculous and trivial detail about ourselves to the entire world. With the advent of phones with cameras, we’ve even started taking voluminous pictures of ourselves, and call them selfies. We are, and always have been, quite full of ourselves.
What has been born out by countless research, however, is that for all our bravado, we really don’t like ourselves all that much. How one sees one’s self determines to a large degree how one sees others. Where we are unsure of our own qualities we find fault in others in an effort to compensate for and distract from our insecurities. We don’t like our bodies, so we shame the bodies of others. We are embarrassed by our own sexual proclivities, so we express outrage at the sexual identities of others. We feel inadequate in our own understanding of a subject, so we refer to those who are experts on that subject in as unflattering a way as possible.Every negative we see or imagine in ourselves we reflect back in some way negatively on others. [/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]For several years, self-help and self-improvement books and audio tapes have been one of the world’s best-selling genres. We understand that our view of ourselves is inferior and misguided, but we are unsure how to best address the issue. Then, studies have shown, once we purchase the book and begin to see what is required to change, we give up and stop reading. We want to improve ourselves without having to make any significant changes or sacrifice to our current lives. If possible, we would happily take a pill to make it all better, but to have to actually work toward improvement is something very few of us are disciplined enough to actually do.
So, we continue, from one generation to the next, parent to child, handing down the same foibles and shortcomings that have limited us since the dawn of our existence. We fight the same wars, often with the same group of people, we have the same arguments, we battle the same ghosts as everyone who has gone before us. We blame others for refusing to change, to grow, or evolve, not wanting to realize that the problem is more with us than with them.
We talk a lot about improving the world, but we must first start by improving ourselves.[/one_half_last]
Point of Origin
Royalty (2011).Model: Danelle French. Face paint: Jennifer Baxter
That means that every human being – without distinction of sex, age, race, skin color, language, religion, political view, or national or social origin – possesses an inalienable and untouchable dignity.—Hans Kung
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]For as long as I can remember, I have had to answer the question, “where are you from?” No matter where I’ve lived, with no regard to how long I might have lived there, the accent with which I speak has never quite matched where I live. I’ve never minded answering the question because it seems reasonable to me that point of origin is a central part of our identity. What amuses me, though, is that as I get older and tell people I’m from Oklahoma (forget those first 12 years in Kansas), they sometimes give me a quizzical look and respond, “No you’re not. You don’t sound or act like anyone from Oklahoma.” For that, I am grateful.
Point of origin has always, throughout history, been an important part of our identity. To which tribe one belonged could mean the difference between free or slave, or even life and death. Our species began as nomadic foragers, roaming to where ever food and shelter were most readily available, but the place from where we started, our point of origin, has always been, and strongly remains, a critical factor upon which judgments, whether just or not, have been made. Inherent social construct inserts a geographic tag into our identity from which there is no escape.
One of the reasons our point of origin so often comes into question is because we, as a species, don’t stay put. Even after all the building of cities and farms, creating and fighting over national borders, and even cruel attempts at keeping people in or out of certain places, we are now more migrant than we have ever been. Our point of origin is but a GPS marker from which all our travels begin. Move so much now that scientists who study such things are referring to the 21st century as the age of the migrant. Not only are we already moving around a lot, it’s going to get worse.
We are all migrants, not because we are born as such, but we cannot help becoming such, leaving our point of origin, sometimes by choice, but with increasing frequency because we have no choice. By engaging in this conversation, it is important to understand the vocabulary. An emigrant is someone known by where they have left. An immigrant is known by where they are going. Coming or going, though, there are over one billion people on the move at any given time, and that number is growing rapidly.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Thomas Nail, a philosopher at the University of Colorado, recently published a book, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015), in which he explains:
Whether to keep us out, keep us in, or simply segregate us for statistical purposes, both societies and governments are concerned with our point of origin as a defining piece of information. There is no escape. The more we move, the more we are connected to where we began. Our great migration is a tremendous force of social change and progress. The world into which one is born holds little resemblance to the one in which we die.
So, more than ever, there remains this question: where are you from?[/one_half_last]
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