Hello, All.

When Liz and I first began “What is Worth Knowing” in March 2007, we aimed to write together. However, I guess that I had so much to write and share that the blog became more personal than I originally thought it would.

SO, I’ve switched over to a new blog to continue my personal musings. You can find “A Walk in the World” at www.awalkintheworld.blogspot.com

My hope is to continue writing here with Liz, so do check back here periodically.

See you soon.

Kelly

From the most recent Heron Dance e-Newsletter:

Writing at its best must come from deep within, for often that is where truth and originality lie; none comes entirely from the upper tenth of gray matter. It is when one reaches down into the dark realms of the past that great ideas surge forth.

—Sigurd F. Olson from Reflections From The North Country

When we follow the symbolic discipline of moving into the well of our Self, we find that we develop an increased capacity of inward perception. This capacity seems to be inherent in human beings and is a natural mode of awareness. Since it is inward, however, it tends to be little used in cultural situations where the individual’s attention is constantly being pressured by the outer environment. When, on the other hand, we establish an atmosphere that makes is possible for the attention to be turned inward in a quiet way, this capacity shows itself to be very actively and strongly present in persons who would have thought they did not possess it at all.

—Ira Progoff, from At a Journal Workshop

Here’s another book for you, dear reader. Smart Women Finish Rich written by David Bach is jam packed with helpful financial advice for women, as well as some sobering facts. I couldn’t believe how much I learned in such a short time, and I credit that to Bach’s reader friendly writing and helpful real-life stories.

Here are some juicy tidbits I learned:

1. Women earn 25% less than men.

2. Women spend 11.5 years off the job v. 16 months for men.

3. Only 5% of Americans can afford to retire at 65.

4. If possible, women should sock away 12% of every pay into a high yielding retirement account.

5. Time is of the essence - start saving sooner rather than later because money compounds over time.

6. Think about what you value and how money may or may not be able to help you achieve those desires.

7. Write yourself a $10 million check, stick it up in your bathroom and look at it every day, believing it’s going to happen.

8. Have a rainy day account which holds at least 6 months of money to survive in case you lose your job, your health or both.

9. Pull your credit reports, which you can do for free once a year, and double check them to make sure all is in order.

10. Get rid of your fear and anxiety about money. Instead, educate yourself as much as possible and treat moola with respect.

11. Best way to get out of debt? Start paying for everything in CASH. Suddenly, shelling out four 20s for a pair of jeans hardly seems worth it.

Whew! These are just some highlights, but the point is that the book was helpful and NOT scary. Check it out!!! It’s entirely worth knowing.

I loved this thought provoking book written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a professor of history at Harvard, and found it both well-written and fascinating. The book gives a nice history of the struggles women have had to overcome over the centuries, as well as excerpts from the writings of these women (i.e. Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, Gloria Steinem, etc…). It’s such fun that I devoured it in about two days. Buy it for every woman you know!

I found the book’s conclusion perhaps the most telling, so I’m going to share it here with all of you.

If history is to enlarge our understanding of human experience, it must include stories that dismay as well as inspire. It must also include the lives of those whose presumed good behavior prevents us from taking them seriously. If well-behaved women seldom make history, it is not only because gender norms have constrained the range of female activity but because history hasn’t been very good at capturing the lives of those whose contributions have been local and domestic. For centuries, women have sustained local communities, raising food, caring for the sick, and picking up the pieces after wars. Today, because more women are educated and communication is easier, more of these projects get noticed, but the work has just begun.

Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, when they create and preserve records, and when later generations care (pp. 227-229).

Well, it seems I’m an INFP (Introvert, Intuition, Feeling and Perception), according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. I’m really not surprised by the results because the last time I took this test I was categorized as an ENFP. Apparently, I’m more of an introvert now than I was 10 years ago. Again, no surprise there. I still love interacting with new people; however, I find it more draining now than I did a decade ago. I’m more selfish of my alone time now, too, as I need my solitude to recharge.

So, what does an INFP look like?

According to the readout I got, someone like this:

Sensitive, concerned, and caring
Loyal to people or a cause
Guided by an inner core of values in decision making
Focused on contributing to their own and others’ inner development and growth
Committed to a strong personal belief system
Likely to enjoy reading, discussing, and reflecting on possibilities for positive change
Usually seen by others as sensitive, introspective and complex

Yep, I’d say that’s me in a nutshell.

Here are a few other quotes I’d like to draw attention to from my readout:

“INFPs look for meaning; they look for it in their lives, in their work, and in their relationship with others. They may feel a strong need to contribute something of importance to the world or to have an impact on the lives of those about whom they care, though they can also be quiet observers of people and humanity at large.”

“INFPs have a desire for harmony which may at times get in the way of their getting their own needs met.”

“Intuition gives their Feeling a future focus and orients INFPs to the abstract and symbolic. Intuition, however, is always secondary to the
deep-felt valuing and caring that characterizes their Feeling. Their orientation to the future something finds expression in their desire to help others manifest their potential. Their Intuition may also find embodiment in creative activity or show itself as an interest in communication.”

“If interested, INFPs may find an outlet for their gifts in the fields of writing, journalism, or foreign languages…their writing also tends to have a warm personal tone. Many INFPs also have a deep love and enjoyment of reading.”

“With interests in academics they may be found in the fields of literature, psychology, and the arts and sciences. Spirituality can also play a large role in their lives, as they look for a personal connection to something larger than themselves. Though INFPs care about people, they are often drawn to fields where they can work independently. Their behavior in the outer world is usually characterized by flexibility and they may be frustrated by routine, structure and rules.”

“Because INFPs are often attracted to new possibilities, and because they may have difficulty saying no, they may bite off more than they can chew. They can have too many projects going to successfully complete any of them. Under stress, they may also become rigid and perfectionistic, feel inadequate, and become critical of themselves. Under extreme stress, and in surprising contrast to their tolerant and caring style, they may even become outwardly critical of others, feeling that others are failing to meet the ideals the INFP has set for them.”

Well, that’s me, I guess, at least according to this test. I agree with it on the whole, although it also shows that I like to make lists of things to do AND that I enjoy structure when I’m over-busy! Still, while I mostly rebel against these types of tests, it’s always nice to have an additional mirror into ourselves. I love learning, so I’m happy to take this and expand it in my own life.

Hello, dear readers. I can’t believe it’s been so long since I last wrote. My only excuse is that Justin was in town and that I was trying to soak up as much time with him as possible, which left little time for blogging. Thanks for being so patient. One last thing before I move on with today’s blog…last Saturday, we went up to Fallingwater, which is the house Frank Lloyd Wright built for the Kaufmann family back in the 1930s. It’s the beautiful house which sits over the waterfall. VERY cool. Anyway, we met my mom there for lunch and the tour and right before she arrived Justin officially proposed! I couldn’t be more tickled or excited about our future together. He’s wonderful in every way.

He left just this past Wednesday, and I’m sorely missing his presence here. I’ll see him again at Christmas, though, so the three weeks apart won’t be so bad.

Okay…on to today’s blog.

I work with mean girls.

Really.

I didn’t think this was possible past high school, but it is, although this is the first time SINCE high school that I’ve really encountered it.

The only difference is that the display of said “meanness” is more subtle now. Greetings in the morning are ignored, as are goodbyes. Questions into how they are feeling or how their weekends or holidays were are met with “polite” one word answers. The worst, I think, is the cold exclusion and judging stares on everything from hairstyle to wardrobe, etc…

Worst off is that I hear these women’s comments about other people! Unkind, at best! It makes the work environment less than ideal, especially when these women, who are very good at their jobs and who also outrank me though they’re years younger, most likely see me as the newbie who needs “hazed”, as one of them put it.

I suppose this bothers me as much as it does because it’s just so juvenile, rude and unneccessary. I have countless Ally McBeal moments throughout each day, in which I fantasize saying things like, “Um, pardon me, let’s try this again. I said, “hello, how are you today?” and that’s your cue to say, “well, fine, thanks for asking.”

Instead, I grumble, take a few deep breaths, and remind myself that these women are actually providing wonderful opportunities for growth and expansion. With them in my life, I can practice patience and compassion more readily each day!

=)

What saddens me, though, is when women treat each other like enemies or freeze each other out of communities and friendships. So, I would challenge all you women out there who read this blog to examine yourself. Are you a mean girl? Is there another woman in your life who is trying to build a friendship with you or who just needs to be recognized in some way? If so, reach out to her, even if it’s just a smile or warm, genuine greeting.

If we don’t start building bridges soon, how will we, as women, ever advance, especially if we build bridges and leave some of our sisters on the other side?

Recently, I listened to a 50 something year old man spout off about his annoyance with the “new” generation and its feelings of entitlement. “They” expect instant results with everything, don’t understand the value of hard work and patience, want the wealth and success of their parents now, and are sometimes ruthless in their attempts to achieve these things.

My first reaction upon hearing his vitriolic monologue was to defend these “youngsters”. In fact, the group about which he speaks isn’t that much younger than me…they’re in their early twenties and are taking the workforce by storm. However, the more I meditated on his words, the more I thought that he spoke some truth.

Over the years, I have worked with this generation through teaching. My interactions with them have been relatively positive, except that I have been continually shocked by their lack of work ethic and amazement when quick advancement does not rain down easily upon them. Still, I chalked most of it up to youth and thought no more about it.

However, now that I am interacting with them on another level, the workplace, I find them to be arrogant and, at times, disrespectful towards those possessing more experience than they.

In an effort to determine if my encounters were localized, I’ve checked in with my friends and family across the country about this generation. Were their experiences the same? Was I imagining it or not seeing them clearly?

What I learned is that most older people view them the same way as me and cite several reasons for the arrogance and aggressiveness: my father sees them as having grown up with a better economy under which families didn’t have to sacrifice as often as those did before the Clinton era. A friend of mine calls them the “video game” generation, having been molded by games which bring about quick results and encouraging even more demanding expectations of life’s experiences. Another labels them as the “instant” generation, citing the fact that they never had to wait for anything…many were given cell phones at an early age, credit cards, too. It is a generation which is used to instant access to everything, including information. Their demands for instant success and wealth follow what they’ve been taught by society at large.

A friend of mine, who is 23, said to me recently, “Is there anything really wrong with wanting instant results? I mean, am I wrong to want nice things now and not wait until I’m 50 to get them?” His comments made me pause, and I came to conclude that he has a very valid point.

There is NOTHING wrong with wanting the success and wealthy of our parents *today*. However, there is value in struggling for them today.

I think struggling for the things you want develops character and backbone. As my yoga teacher, Michael, used to say, “If everything was easy, what would it be worth?” Gabbow, my 82 year old grandmother, often remarks that “kids today don’t know the value of hard work or struggle. They want everything to be easy, but life is not designed to be easy.” She is horrified that most young people today are in debt over their heads and don’t seem to want to work to make things right.

The older I get, the more I agree with Gabs. Life isn’t easy. There is struggle and there are many things we can’t control. However, we can approach the process with patience, humility and grace. We can learn to respect those who have already walked the paths we find ourselves walking today. Sure, we might be able to walk it more quickly, but what might we miss if we speed by *too* quickly?

I think sometimes when we surround ourselves with people who think like us, we do not always grow as quickly as we could if we encountered dissenting views and challenging personalities. As of late, I’ve been attending training for my new job and I’m interacting with personalities I would never seek out on my own. Instead of getting annoyed with them, which would be an easy reaction, I have chosen instead to listen for the messages with which they’re undoubtedly presenting me.

My forced interactions with them, however uncomfortable, are teaching me valuable lessons and reminding me of others.

For example, one woman I’ve encountered second guesses everything our teacher says. I’m not kidding. My class cannot have a discussion about anything without her chiming in with a dissenting view. The class, in turn, squirms uncomfortably in their seats and groans, often out loud, whenever she begins. However, I think what she is doing is reminding us all that we cannot take everything someone in an authoritative position states as being fact. She’s showing us that there are a lot of hidden assumptions in our teacher’s commentary, and it’s good to pause and revisit those comments with fresh ears.

Another man in my class just quit his job. The class gasped when they heard this news, especially since his time in training would be cut short. However uncomfortable his decision made the class, (my hunch is that it is actually the secret desire of the majority to do the same), I chose to view his decision as a reminder to have courage under fire. I respect him for this decision because he decided that after working in that position for a year and being miserable in the process (especially since he had a 4 hour commute EACH DAY), life was too short to continue the job. I’m happy to report that he quickly found another job and now makes twice what he did at his former job!

My point? Instead of turning your ears off to those who make you most uncomfortable, why not open them up and listen for the lessons these individuals are giving you? You may receive similar teachings from your own circle of friends; however, they may not come as quickly as those which come from strangers.

I woke up early this morning (5.30am!) thinking about the horrendous conditions some of the women in Afghanistan live with on a daily basis, some of this resulting from my recent reading about women there. They have experienced so much war, upheaval and devastation in their lives due the various wars which have been waged in Afghanistan that I really don’t know how they’ve survived. Enduring constant warfare since the 1970s, first with a civil war, then with the Soviet invasion (1979), then the Taliban (1996) and most recently with the US (Operation Enduring Freedom, October 2001), they have found their countryside pillaged and many of their young men dead.

If all of this suffering wasn’t enough, on top of it, many Afghan women have had to endure physical, verbal, emotional and sexual abuse, often at the hands of men they know. Many find themselves married off to men two or three times their age - many marrying at 14 or 15 years old. Unless women had progressive parents, many were not educated and did not work outside the home, if at all. Many of the privileges women enjoyed during the Soviet invasion were taken from them when the Taliban emerged as the leading political/religious group in the mid-90s.

While things are improving for women in Afghanistan today (i.e. women can work with the permission of their husbands or families), much abuse still continues. If you are unfamiliar with the beautiful landscape of Afghanistan, I encourage you to familiarize yourselves, dear readers, with its lush and varied past.

For example, Afghanistan had several cities on the Silk Road (Herat, Bamiyan and Kabul) and was the crossroads for many cultures and religions. Most interesting is the country’s Buddhist past. Bamiyan was known to be a Buddhist hotspot in the first millenium, up until the Islamic invasion in the 9th century. You probably are familiar with the city’s name, as this was the place where the standing statues of Buddha were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 for being “un-Islamic”. Before Islam arrived, over 2,000 Buddhist monks lived in the caves surrounding these statues and painted numerous frescoes in them. While there is some historical evidence that Bamiyan had three giant Buddhas, only two were destroyed in 2001. According to a Wikipedia site:

“The two most prominent statues were the giant, standing Buddhas, measuring 55 and 37 metres (180 and 121 feet) high respectively, the largest examples of standing Buddha carvings in the world. They were perhaps the most famous cultural landmarks of the region and the site was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site along with surrounding cultural landscape and archaeological remains of the Bamyan Valley.

The smaller of the two statues was built in the year AD 507. The larger one was constructed in 554. The statues are believed to have been built by the Kushans and Indo-Hephthalites (both eastern Indo-European peoples) at the heyday of their empires. The above mentioned groups were the ancestors of the Hazaras, the most persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan. Physical and facial features of the Hazaras are greatly similar to those in the frescoes found in the ancient relics and caves. Furthermore, considering the historical importance of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, unsuccessful claims over the Buddha heritage have been made by all the ethnic groups in Afghanistan.

Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsüan-tsang (Xuanzang) passed through the area around AD 630 and described Bamiyan as a flourishing Buddhist center “with more than ten monasteries and more than a thousand monks”, and he noted that both Buddha figures were “decorated with gold and fine jewels” (Wriggins, 1995). Xuan Zang’s account is intriguing as he mentions a third, even larger, reclining statue of Buddha; although it is generally believed destroyed, some archaeological expeditions are searching for it.

A monumental sitting Buddha similar in style to those at Bamiyan still exists in the Bingling Temple caves in China’s Gansu province.”

I’d like to point out two things here: One, in 1999, the Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Omar actually issued a decree proclaiming that the statues should be protected and, as there was no longer a Buddhist community in Bamiyan, the statues were not in danger of being worshipped. However, in 2001, the Taliban decided all images were “un-Islamic” and the statues were destroyed. Two, the Wikipedia article cites that the Valley of Bamiyan and its archaeological remains were placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, which is true. However, it didn’t get placed on the List until 2003, well after destruction had occurred.

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list

In fact, none of the two sites on the List for Afghanistan were placed on it until AFTER Operation Enduring Freedom began. The same is mostly true for Iraq. Of the three sites listed, only one (Hatra) was protected before the war (1985). This is the issue I focus on in my dissertation, which I hope to finish in the next few years. (Forthcoming blog on this topic…stay tuned!).

So, where can you go for information about Afghanistan? Talk to people who’ve been there (many folk are coming home from the war or NGO work there), read everything and anything you can about it, research the culture, people, history of Afghanistan yourself. Often, in larger cities, you can find excellent Afghan restaurants, which is always a good place to start!

Deb Rodriguez, author of Kabul Beauty School, had this to say about helping women in Afghanistan:

“There are many of us Westerners who want to help Afghan women, but our efforts don’t always help them in the ways that we hope they will. There are so many ties that bind these women and hold them back, and many of the ties aren’t even visible to the Western eye. It takes a long time to understand how the complexities of these women’s lives differ from the complexities of ours. Sometimes we can’t help, even when we understand these complexities. The culture is changing so much more slowly than their dreams are” (p. 259).

With this in mind, I’m including some books which help crack open the situation in Afghanistan:

Swallows of Kabul - Yasmina Khadra
The Bookseller of Kabul - Asne Seierstad
Kite Runner and One Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
Kabul Beauty School - Deborah Rodriguez

My point? Expand your horizons and reach out to women across the world and in your own neighborhood who cry out for help. My hope is that through education, we can help each other effect change.

Let me just say how MUCH I loved this book. It was incredibly informative and beautifully put together, saying much about the American diet and why we eat what we do. I mean, who KNEW that corn was in almost EVERYTHING!!! I have to wonder if one can really escape corn in this country! Other memorable sections were the pages he spent describing hunting wild boars in CA, the ubiquitousness of Iowa corn, why Polyface farms in Virginia is such a gift and how wild mushrooms taste upon harvest. Michael Pollan has long been one of my favorite authors with The Botany of Desire being especially good. If you’re curious about WHERE your food comes from, I highly encourage you to read this book.

Below you’ll find some of my favorite quotes:

“A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn…to wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) - after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find…Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins…there are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn…even in produce on a day when there’s ostensibly no corn for sale you’ll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce’s perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in” (pp. 18-19).

“Corn was both the currency traders used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food upon which slaves subsisted during their passage to America” (p. 26).

“After Nixon’s 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizers factories. Without them, China would probably have starved” (p. 43).

“The United Nations reported that in 2000 the number of people suffering from overnutrition - a billion - had officially surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition - 800 million” (p. 102).

Here’s something interesting about the concept of Supersizing food:

“Until his death in 1993, [David] Wallerstein served on the board of directors at McDonald’s, but in the fifties and sixties he worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas, where he labored to expand sales of soda and popcorn - the high-mark-up items that theaters depend on for their profitability…Wallerstein tried everything he could think of to goose up sales - two-for-one deals, matinee specials - but found he simply could not induce customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. He thought he knew why: Going for seconds makes people feel piggish. Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda - a lot more - as long as it came in single gigantic serving” (p. 105).

“Before we got off the phone, I asked Salatin if he could ship me one of his chickens and maybe a steak, too. He said that he couldn’t do that. I figured that he meant he wasn’t set up for shipping, so offered him my FedEx account number. “No, I don’t think you understand. I don’t believe it’s sustainable - or ‘organic’, if you will - to FedEx meat all around the country. I’m sorry, but I can’t do it.” This man was serious. “Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley, or organic cut flowers from Peru, doesn’t mean we should do it, not if we’re really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism. I’m afraid if you want to try one of our chickens, you’re going to have to drive down here to Swoope to pick it up” (p. 133).

“Rozin found that the rat minimizes the risk of the new by treating its digestive tract as a kind of laboratory. It nibbles a very litle bit of the new food (assuming it is food) and then waits to see what happens. The animal evidently has a good enough grasp of causality (”delayed learning,” as the social scientists call it) to link a stomach ache in the present to something it ingested a half hour before, and a good enough memory to store that finding as a lifelong aversion to that particular substance. (This is what makes poisoning rats so difficult.)” (p. 288).

“Pregnant women are particularly sensitive to bitter tastes, probably an adaption to protect the developing fetus against even the mild plant toxins found in foods like broccoli. A bitter flavor on the tongue is a warning to exercise caution lest a poison pass what Brillat-Savarin called the sense of taste’s “faithful sentries” (p. 291).

So…you get the idea. Highly informative and easy to digest (pardon the pun). In the end, what Pollan analyzes is that we, Americans, do not have a culture of food, like the French. Instead, we have had cultures bring their food here, but we don’t have any national sense of food. Instead, we’re struggling with what to even eat these days!

As Pollan wrote on p. 301: “Fats or carbs? Three squares or continuous grazing? Raw or cooked? Organic or industrial? Veg or vegan? Meat or mock meat?…is it any wonder Americans suffer from so many eating disorders? In the absence of any lasting consensus about what and how and where and when to eat, the omnivore’s dilemma has returned to America with an almost atavistic force.”

Thoughts?