Getting Real

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I’ve been slowed down by a cold over the last few days.  Slowed enough to give in to watching the type of tv I wouldn’t normally stream on my computer.  Besides, my yoga teacher was recently talked into being on a reality tv show.  It aired a couple of weeks ago and the class has been buzzing about it ever since.

Given that my will was already sapped, I hopped on over to the station’s on demand site and started watching.  I’ve never watched a Reality Television series before.  And with 2.5 hours of my life irretrievably lost, I know I will never watch another one.

I’ve heard plenty about the genre, but there is knowing something intellectually and then there’s watching it unfold in front of your eyes in all its gory detail.  Shudder.

And of course it’s as staged as anything else out there to watch.  Every episode is carefully crafted from set-up to editing.  Including Reality Television employees in the Writers Guild of America, was one of the demands leading to the 2007-2008 Hollywood writer’s strike.

Now that I’ve witnessed one, I can see that Reality TV subscribe to the “conflict is what makes a good story” theory of writing.  This show definitely went out of its way to breed hostility between its “contestants”.  My friend, being a seasoned and dedicated yogini, did her best to stay positive and kind through all 5 episodes, but even she succumbed.  I can only conclude that Reality TV’s raison d’etre is to bring out the worst in people.

It brought out the worst in me.

All the cattiness, all the back-stabbing, the two-facing, the shear mean-spiritedness that was so painstakingly caught on camera sucked me in.  I became judgemental and catty.  The couple that won, obviously didn’t deserve to win and I found myself going on about it for a couple of hours afterwards.

Stories are contagious.

Beginning with The Slow Knitter

The very first blog I kept was called “The Slow Knitter”.  It was 2006, I’d learned to knit a couple of years before and I got hooked on all the crafting blogs popping up like wildflowers on the internet, especially the ones with free patterns.

The “Slow” in the title had a double meaning.  I was still very much a newby, so it took me a long time to knit each piece.  But I also meant “slow” as in the “slow food” movement, as in taking the time to enjoy the making and the using of something; hand-crafting, local, simple, all those adjectives.

The blog helped me maintain momentum in my newfound crafting life, and it provided me with a space to reflect on how my knitting tied into wider things.  I explored sourcing local yarn, organic cottons, milk protein needles, natural dying…all the political, social and environmental issues of handcrafting.

Eventually The Slow Knitter grew beyond the bounds of crafting and became Green Living Ottawa. I learned to crochet, gave my knitting needles away and never looked back.   However, that whole experience gave me entry into the blogosphere, into crafting, and into the idea of strengthening personal accountability by sharing myself and my values publicly.

Of course I could always lie.  Lying in public is kind of what defines us as a civilisation in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and the internet seems custom made to make lying that much easier.  Which is why I admire all those bloggers online who take a stand against the tide of bullshit, who try to find their own way in the world and live their values out loud.  Their voices are life lines thrown out to the rest of us.  So today I want to give thanks to the simple and creative living bloggers whose posts I’ve been hanging onto recently:

And as I make a return to active blogging, I want to share my intention that what I post will be a means to find, follow and embody my values.

Why Violence against Women and Children is an Environmental Issue

There are many reasons why violence against women and children is an environmental issue.  The one I have in mind tonight, however, has to do with access to “wild” spaces.

I’m not going to get into the whole debate over what is “wild” and whether “wilderness” actually exists anymore.  What I want to focus on is access to places that are not completely dominated by human beings, their artifacts and their activities.  There are many arguments why access to these sorts of places is healthy for both people and for the environment.  The problem is, access is unequal across society, and I’m not talking about physical distance or even car ownership.

Over the past two weeks, in my job as a research fellow, I’ve been analysing transcripts of interviews with women adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.  The focus of the research is on the impact of that abuse and of subsequent counselling on their experience of parenting.

During the day I’ve been immersed in these women’s stories.  Meanwhile, at night I’ve been reading, and enjoying immensely, Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places for my Green Book Group.  The Wild Places is a series of essays recounting MacFarlane’s adventures in some of the last wild places in the British Isles.  In terms of their geographies, the two sets of stories could not be more heart-breakingly different.

By hiking in to remote places and staying there, usually on his own, MacFarlane has some amazing experiences, encountering storms and wild animals, geological oddities and secret worlds.  Reading his stories was inspiring.  I wanted to take the journeys he took, have the encounters with the more-than-human that he had.  But as a woman I wouldn’t want to go alone, and that’s without ever having experienced what the women I was reading about had gone through.

Through the transcripts of the interviews, I read about women who were uncomfortable being left alone in a strange place even for a few minutes.  I read about the overwhelming anxiety they felt when their children were out of sight, when they were down the road at the playground, when they came home from friends’ houses later than they had promised.  In one story, a new mother’s geography contracted to the size of her child’s room as she watched over her baby, afraid something terrible was going to happen.  When her daughters were older, she could not bring herself to allow them out on their own, not even into the back garden.

Despite and even because of their experiences, these women made efforts to give their children better childhoods.  One mother wanted to make sure her sons had access to the natural world, giving them opportunities to play in mud and walk barefoot on beaches, even as she struggled inside with feelings of anxiety.  Another spoke of the simple joy she felt, now that she’d gone through counselling, playing with her daughter in the woods, making up for her own lost childhood.

I’ve only come across this issue of violence against women as a barrier to accessing “wild” places in a couple of nature writers’ work.  In Bird Songs of the Mesozoic, David Brendan Hopes writes about feeling uncomfortable encountering a female jogger alone in an urban woods where a woman had recently been assaulted.  Lisa Couturier, who is a hero of mine, includes an essay entitled “For All the Girls Who Couldn’t Walk into the Woods” in her collection The Hopes of Snakes.  The subject, of course, how violence against women restricts women’s access to these wild places, not because we fear heights or currents, sharks or bears, but because we’ve learned to fear the male of our own species.

As if to drive this point home, my husband and I started watching the Danish TV series “The Killing” this weekend.  It begins with a teenage girl being hunted through the woods in the dark.

Robert MacFarlane, The Wild Places, Penguin Books: 2007 (0143113933).

David Brendan Hopes, Bird Songs of the Mesozoic: A Day Hiker’s Guide to the Nearby Wild, Milkweed Editions: 2005 (1571312773).

Lisa Couturier, The Hopes of Snakes & Other Tales from the Urban Landscape, Beacon Press: 2005 (0807085650)