by tashmcgill | Sep 25, 2014 | Bodies, Culture & Ideas, Health, Mind
I’m not Beyonce or Kim Kardashian, but I’ve got booty. And I’m resolutely proud of it, actually. Prouder now than I was ten or even five years ago. It’s a symbol of strength, capacity and my relative wealth. Still, I’ve scorned and joked my way through endless Instagram posts.
“Do you even lift?”
“Squats all day.”
“Every day is leg day.”
I never considered myself to be body-obsessed, let alone butt-obsessed. Body conscious, for sure. Who isn’t? I’ve written about those issues some. Then I was talking with my friend Jessie – the talented, intelligent and compassionate @bloore). In talking about self-image and the age of selfies, she told me about removing almost every mirror from her house so she could learn not to look at herself.
Jessie’s captivating thought, while not the central idea of my post is worthy of a summary. Our obsession with mirrors and now, selfies, causes us to form our identity or self-image from an external observation. We observe ourselves and pass judgement or scrutinize our flaws. (At the same time, I think it gives us carte blanche opportunity to indulge our vanities too – TM.)
So I tried it for a few days. I paid attention to how I used the mirror. To be honest, I think I did ok. Not that many selfies, a tiny mirror in the bathroom doesn’t allow much scrutiny and there’s no full length mirror in my bedroom either. That might explain a few things. But I was totally mistaken.
I realised what was happening while I was walking to work. Past a run of glass windows, I caught myself studying my reflection. I’m a secret glancer, but not too secret. I caught myself almost every day. Not just mornings, but on the way to meetings and leaving at the end of the day.
So I paid attention to the pattern my eyes travelled. Butt, hips, knees, hair, sometimes the shadow of my chin, and then my butt. Lingering on the butt, particularly if walking uphill. In the work kitchen, the mirrored splashback means I pay attention to my hair and eyes, same as in the rear-vision mirror of my car. But anywhere else, I was a butt-watcher.
Day after day, I caught myself in the same patterns. So I started to think even more about what I was paying attention to and what I was looking for. Then I realised it was beauty, normalised beauty. My stomach is strong but soft. My arms have definition and curves. My legs are powerhouses. I’m short and curvy and strong, but all of that is acceptable in the curvaceous globes of those gluteous maximus and their supporting muscalature. In those moments, I belong to the beautiful crowd – we are alike. Those rounded curves are just as well formed as some of the best I’ve seen, hidden in clothes.
That beauty is more than just a physical sense of appreciation. It’s deeper. We have to become reconnected to our bodies and integrated with what they tell us. My butt is a staunch reflection of my character and personality. Gregarious, generous but in proportion, equal parts soft and strong, with strength that can’t be seen but only felt or experienced. My butt is one part of my body that really feels like me, if my heart and soul was flesh and blood. And my ass doesn’t make apologies, or demand them from me. It just opens doors with a kick of my hip or sashays down the pavement when taken by the mood.
I’m in two minds about the the endless parade of booty songs on the radio – they are not the kind of empowering I was looking for. But they rightly give women the opportunity to reclaim their bodies. I just want to reclaim mine for more than sex, whilst still being sexy.
I don’t wear yoga pants outside of the gym. I do wear tight jeans. My ass is not #belfie-perfect but I do squat and lunge and lift and climb steps taller than my calves. My ass is not a sex-symbol, it’s a powerhouse of confidence. That’s no brave feminist voice, either. I literally can carry 15 – 20kgs of toddler on each hip, supported by that butt. It powers me up stairs faster than my long-legged colleagues and it cushions every hard and cold surface I have to sit myself on. Am I a proud butt-watcher? Well, I don’t know. I’m not watching anyone else’s. I just see what my own is accomplishing and feel somehow stronger. I appreciate how I fill out my own jeans. I’m not likely to post a #belfie anytime soon – but I have a butt worth admiring on it’s own merits.
What is this vanity – this self-obsession with my physical being that can produce such torment and such joy, such satisfaction and a sense of pride? Can I weather it, just accept it and let it be – that the one thing I might catch myself watching is the one thing that gives me confidence instead of robbing it?
There are other parts of my physical self I might add to the watching list then; my cooking callouses, my calf definiton, the scalloping abdominals under their soft stomach blanket. The skin that carries my stories in tattoo, the eyes that are equal parts my mother and father. There are many parts of my body I would reclaim and let them be pride-stirring, strength-giving reminders that I am in fact, not my body. But my essence is reflected in it.
by tashmcgill | Sep 25, 2014 | Community, Culture & Ideas
Great beauty or purpose without design is a rare and miraculous thing. The more beauty, ease and purpose, the more likely you are to find great design. That is why architecture is such an important part of communities and hospitality. It starts with our homes and ends in our town squares and public spaces – at it’s core, town planning is about creating functional and healthy communities that live well together,
Hospitality is my great art form. Welcoming people into my spaces and making them feel completely at home, as if they were their own. Part of that love includes a love of designing and making spaces that encourage conversation and comfort. For this reason, I love front porches. My love of the American South is birthed in my love of these homes with wide open entranceways, homes that greet the street with living spaces, spaces that are meant to be seen and enjoyed. I also love the hospitality that flows naturally through these spaces and into neighbourhoods and streets.
(more…)
by tashmcgill | Sep 4, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Friendship, Love & Marriage
Here’s what I wrote on Facebook this Valentine’s Day: just a thought about constructing love that lasts whatever the relationship context may be. I wrote it because I believe that Love is something made over time. It might begin in a moment or a series of moments – but for it to last it must be crafted, thoughtful, constructed, built, fixed, refashioned, renovated, added to over time with intention, creativity and purpose. It does not happen by accident. Love cannot be found, but Love comes looking for you. (more…)
by tashmcgill | Aug 19, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Leadership, Strategy
I was talking with a recent design graduate the other day. They were talking about how they were never going to ‘sell out’ by working for a big corporate agency. Their philosophy was pretty simple – as far as they were concerned, working for a big agency would mean working on big client accounts that would always be driven by money, not by the integrity of the art.
I hear this all the time – first from cynical Generation Xers and now from optimistic Millennials. And every time, it frustrates me to see intelligent, smart and talented people constraining their own potential to influence amazing creative work and see demonstrable change. Here’s why the graduate is wrong and you should consider encouraging more people to ‘sell out’. (more…)
by tashmcgill | Aug 11, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Monologue, Prose & Poetry
I am fascinated by how relationships transform as people move in and out of one anothers lives. I came across an old photograph and was struck by this idea: the story of a woman contemplating the changes in her life and how she will live always anticipating the death of someone who was once close to her but is now far removed. The digital age often means that though we are protracted from one another, we are never fully removed from the circles of relationship that connect us.
Sometimes I see your photograph and wonder how Death will come to you. Once, when we lived around each other I worried about what you ate and how you drank. I fussed over your posture and lack of concern for fibres. Fibres to keep you warm, woven to cover your skin from the elements. You never wore enough clothes in winter.
You had that one navy fishermans sweater, with look-a-like suede patches on your elbows. You wore it with those black jeans that swooped over your non-existent backside. It’s a trade-off, I suppose, for those long legs. Your toes, long and sparsely covered with hair, poking through the sandals you profusely expounded upon. You have always chosen the strangest idioms to be passionate about. You are still a curiosity in that way, I suspect. Ranting about finding the perfect fit, as if it was some revelation.
Oh, yes, that’s it. You have a gift for making the mundane into a revelation. That’s why I always enjoyed you, being around you even on the fringes of a conversation you were orchestrating.
It makes sense to think of you as a conductor, commanding the music by script and form with your movement and sheer presence; a force of will on the earth. I wonder about your body now as it ages, your shoulders that must fall even further forward. You always curved yourself in to type, or cut or do anything with your hands. You have always had this way of wrapping yourself entirely around an activity; until it lost your attention. I wonder if you have slowly suffocated your hips and lungs from fully functioning.
I see your face through other people’s eyes now. They capture you in fleeting splashes of light; in cities I once traveled before I knew you. They frame you walking those streets as if they are your own, but you don’t really care for possessions. I think even now, you probably care mostly for the objects you’ve made symbols of this new man you’ve become. A notebook and a beard are like weapons of war for you.
But I see you truly; the proud tilt of your hips tipping your belly forward. Sometimes I wonder if you are eating anything to sustain your endless body. It is long and lanky but when you stand still you make remarkable curves. There is nothing soft about you but you curl around the atmosphere and air you breathe. You are rebellious in your being; for the sake of it. Or, I should say – you were. I remember that you were.
I shouldn’t presume to know such things now. That body and those eyes I have stared at, fought with and known for a dozen years; I wonder how it will decay? I no longer observe you daily so each glimpse is like the passing of an age between, you change so much. You age before me and my reflection ages too, but the sight of myself does not shock or rattle me. I wonder now if our character can change as quickly as our exterior? We change so much when we are young and it leaves no mark upon us and then we collapse into middle age. Do our bodies simply begin to catch up with the people we have become?
How will Death come to you? I wonder what it will be like to walk past your coffin. Or will there be a plaque that signals where your ashes are spilled into the ocean or air? Air, I think although you professed to love the ocean so. If there is a funeral, I wonder where I will sit and how far back before I drift into the shadows.
Your wife, as beautiful then as now, will probably say carefully chosen words in her soft voice. Her tears will be fresh and new. Mine will be decades old and dry, they may not even fall. I’ve been wondering for such a long time how Death will find us, my grief already feels ages old. Oh, how I grieve you, bright light. You are a wonder to me still. I miss the smell of you in the room; leather and musk and determination.
I hope it’s quick. I don’t want to hear of your decay coming slowly by protracted illness. It’s all so ungraceful at our age, to go slowly from infection. No, I prefer to think of that hardened fat from late night burgers laden with bacon and extra cheese snapping at your arteries and taking you quickly. I always worried about how you ate. I hope that it comes to some good and spares you the indignity of hospitals and 16 pill-a-day regimens.
I couldn’t bear to hear of you slowly fading from the earth. You should at least, in this one thing, be definitive. It always took you so long to commit to anything, you can do this for us, at least. Go quickly and follow through, don’t leave us wondering. Death may at last, be the one thing that unveils you and forces you to be true.
Yes, I wonder how Death will come to you, and then to Us. I have been waiting so patiently to say goodbye. You’re barely over the cusp of 40 years. The scales are about to tip, you know. By this time next year, you’ll have been gone from my side longer than you stayed. What a curious and puzzling thing. I do not think about your dying or your pain or your absence, but I wonder how, how will it come to be? Perhaps it is because we are a story; a book. Someone has crept in and torn out Chapter 19.
Chapter 20 is some lesson, some goodness or inheritance you leave behind. The meaning for those that will know you at the end, but I have known you up til now. I have not found the meaning yet. In death you’ll be revealed at last, but people are always too kind then. Still I want to know how it goes and what they say, when they know at last what I know.
Yet, sometimes I feel you curled around me – shoulders slumped forward, legs tilted into my hips and your hands close to my face, as if I am a thing that requires your entire attention. When I see your photograph, there is a moment of claustrophobia before I remember that you have unwrapped yourself. The bonds are cut so I breathe and regain myself. I remember what it was like to be the centre of all that chaos and energy in the world and what it is like to watch from a distance.
Your photograph sometimes changes, the streets a different version of the city you are in. Your countenance is the same. Your eyes still sharp, watching and anticipating. I see you hungry for what you will wrap yourself around next. I remember that look; I wonder how Death will come to you and if you will look Death in the eye before you wrap yourself around it, the sole focus of your attention; counting how you could make dying an achievement too.
by tashmcgill | Jun 20, 2014 | Community, Culture & Ideas
“Criticism, you are
a helping
hand,
bubble in the level, mark on the steel,
notable pulsation.
With a single life
I will not learn enough.”
Pablo Neruda remains one of my favourite poets. Beyond the schoolgirl days of Sylvia Plath and Shakespearian sonnets – Neruda was writing so politically, so astutely of his time and space that it’s nearly impossible to call him anything but a political writer.
His prowess is equal only to his capacity for immense failure at times – epic screeds of verse that would never make publication in today’s world, but in the reading and comparison of such, create the wonder of the times he landed his composition so eloquently right.
As a writer, criticism is often captured with red pen edits in my life. As a speaker, the crowd goes quiet. As a member of communities and a family – it comes in loud voices, arguments, discussions, silences and facial expressions that do not bear dissecting. Where do you face criticism? Your boss, your colleagues, your lover or your children? (more…)
