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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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01 Nov 2022
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November Artist of the Month: Mikko Tyllinen

 

 

 

Artist Statement:

I’m a self-taught artist from Finland, working in many different traditional mediums and digital art. I especially like to create digital art that feels as if it’s made in a traditional medium.

It feels that such thoughts give paintings more of a deep and emotional charge on so many levels.

My art creativity gravitates to symbolism, mysterious landscapes and music of color.

I aspire to understand the essence of nature, the world in philosophical-mystical relation to me. Always try to open harmony of the world in details or the generalized compositions.

Our world is so beautiful, and I try to capture all that magic in canvas and thought that brings all that beauty and joy to people.

I have participated in numerous exhibitions around Finland, Monaco, Russia, France, Spain, Italy and England. My work has received many international High Recognition Awards, and my works are in private collections around the world.

Connect with me:

https://mishelangello.blogspot.com/

https://twitter.com/MikkoTyllinen

http://www.instagram.com/mishelangello/

http://www.facebook.com/artofmikkotyllinen/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 Oct 2022
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Why Don’t More Men Take Their Wives’ Last Names?

In the run-up to marriage, many couples, particularly those of a more progressive bent, will encounter a problem: What is to be done about the last name?

Some have attempted work-arounds: the Smiths and Taylors who have become Smith-Taylors, Taylor-Smiths, or—more creative—Smilors. But there just isn’t always a good, fair option. (While many straight couples fall back on the option of a woman taking her husband’s last name, same-sex couples have no analogous default.)

And so it is that, even after generations of feminist progress, the expectation, at least for straight couples, has remained: Women take the man’s last name. Seventy-two percent of adults polled in a 2011 study said they believe a woman should give up her maiden name when she gets married, and half of those who responded said they believe that it should be a legal requirement, not a choice. In some states, married women could not legally vote under their maiden name until the mid-1970s.

The opposite—a man taking his wife’s name—remains incredibly rare: In a study of 877 heterosexual married men, less than three percent took their wife’s name when they got married. When her fiancé, Avery, announced that he wanted to take her last name, Becca Lamb, a 23-year-old administrative assistant living in Washington, D.C., told me that, at first, she said no: “It shocked me. I had always expected to take my husband’s last name someday. I didn’t want to do anything too out of the norm.”

But the prospect of a married man adopting his wife’s last name hasn’t always been so startling in Western cultures. In medieval England, men who married women from wealthier, more prestigious families would sometimes take their wife’s last name, says Stephanie Coontz, a professor of marriage and family history at Evergreen State College. From the 12th to the 15th century, Coontz told me, in many “highly hierarchical societies” in England and France, “class outweighed gender.” It was common during this period for upper-class English families to take the name of their estates. If a bride-to-be was associated with a particularly flashy castle, the man, Coontz says, would want to benefit from the association. “Men dreamed of marrying a princess,” she says. “It wasn’t just women dreaming of marrying a prince.”

In America today, many men tend to have the same hang-up about surrendering their last names, says Brian Powell, a professor of family and gender at Indiana University Bloomington who has studied attitudes toward marital name changes: They worry they’ll be seen as less of a man. And it seems they’re probably right.

In a forthcoming study, Kristin Kelley, a doctoral student working with Powell, presented people with a series of hypothetical couples that had made different choices about their last name, and gauged the subjects’ reactions. She found that a woman’s keeping her last name or choosing to hyphenate changes how others view her relationship. “It increases the likelihood that others will think of the man as less dominant—as weaker in the household,” Powell says. “With any nontraditional name choice, the man’s status went down.” The social stigma a man would experience for changing his own last name at marriage, Powell told me, would likely be even greater.

Of course, the man-takes-wife’s-name solution, like hyphenation and the last-name mishmash, is imperfect. Even though it may turn gender convention on its head—a plus for some couples—nevertheless one partner is giving up his name and, in a sense, losing a slice of the person he was before he got married. It comes with other challenges too: Because so few men opt to change their name, couples who make the unconventional choice are well aware they’ll stick out, eliciting questions for as long as anyone can remember their names before marriage. Lamb told me that there was no way for her husband to “casually” take her name. It would be a big deal, no matter how hard she tried to play it down. “And I didn’t want my marriage to be a political statement,” she said.

But by thinking this way, Lamb said, she knew she was perpetuating the same norms that she felt stuck in. Men don’t take their wife’s last name, Becca’s husband, Avery, told me, because they lack examples of other men doing the same thing. “When we told the people in our life that I was taking Becca’s last name, some said they didn’t even know you could do that.”

For some couples, it comes down to the particulars of the various name options before them. When he and his then-girlfriend decided to get married, David Slusky, an economist based in Lawrence, Kansas, carefully considered what a name change would mean for both him and his future wife. At the time, he was a management consultant about to transition into academia, but his wife was already in graduate school, publishing academic papers, and building a reputation in her chosen field.

“Your name is your brand,” Slusky told me. “And when I got married, I happened to be at a moment in my career when rebranding wouldn’t really hurt me.” Once he had that thought, Slusky says, the choice was easy. For Jonah Gellar, who also took his wife’s last name, the choice came down to making sure both surnames survived. His ex-wife (they have since divorced), Debbie, was the last Gellar likely to have kids, but Jonah was the first of three siblings. “I figured one of them could worry about our last name.” The decision, he says, brought him closer to Debbie and the rest of her family.

It wasn’t until the very end of our conversation that he mentioned the other reason he wanted to change his name. “My last name used to be Falk,” he said, sheepishly. “Pronounced ‘phallic.’”

 

 

Original article here

19 Sep 2022
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The Work of Radical Frugality

 

There are some people who are frugal by nature, some who practice frugality as a mandate of their faith, and some, like myself, who embrace frugality by necessity. I live within a limited income as a bulwark against a consumer culture and capitalist agenda that would prefer we consume our way to oblivion—both ours and the planet’s. We are in a quagmire given the conundrum of the capitalist agenda, a system that requires endless consumption and growth to survive, and a planet that is begging we cease. Personally, I’d rather take my instruction from Mother Earth.

Of course, there are those who might disregard my call for frugality. They are the ones who, despite all efforts, will never be able to live within their means even if they wanted to. The working poor are just that—working one, two, or three jobs and still unable to make ends meet. For them and us, advocating for workers’ rights, fair wages, and enacting legislative policies aimed at economic equality is vital. But this is not an either-or position: We can be advocates of economic parity while at the same time turning down the heat on a historically rapacious capitalist economy by becoming producers and consumers in the home economy.

Over the years, I have taught and written about living in a home economy. But this is less a throwback to some 1950s-era domestic ideal than an approach toward undermining an American psyche and economy that has thrown us into unnecessary debt, encouraged us to buy our way to happiness, and all but driven us from our homes.

By “home,” I am not referring to a physical space alone, though we are being driven, evicted, and displaced from our homes more and more these days, which is why we have become homeless in both form and function. I’m talking about the transiency and dependency that defines and supports the capitalist consumer culture. With neither the skills nor the inclination to stay in place or do for ourselves, we turn to the marketplace for our needs. (Not for nothing, there is an irony to all this talk of place-making when no one wants to stay in place anymore.) This dependency has a long history. It is not for naught that we have become, for all intents and purposes, indentured servants, living on credit and owing our soul to the company store. This is how the system is intended to work. The indentured make docile workers, and Amazon would be happy to bring you into its fold.

Beyond that, there is value and comfort in the making of a home. My respect for “home,” or the type of work that living in a home economy suggests, is due, in part, to my childhood. Growing up as the daughter of two immigrant parents who moved to New York following World War II, I understood, or saw, what utility born of frugality looked like. My father worked as a tailor and my mom worked to make a home in a railroad flat shared with relatives and boarders, and later in our own apartment in the Bronx.

Together, my parents sewed our clothes, made curtains and bedspreads, mended, repaired, cooked every meal at home, and basically did for themselves or did without. But, more significantly, they offered a sense of home, security, and comfort that was tangible to me as a child; one that I have carried forward as an adult. And yet, despite all my skills, my knowledge, and my refusenik underpinnings, I do not have what my parents had. In fact, many of us do not have this: the relationships bound by the need and a commitment to make a self-sufficient home.

It was the ancient Greeks who first coined the term “economics,” or “oikonomia,” as a system of household (oikos) management (nomia). So economics refers to the management system that serves your home. What that home is may vary—the planet, your body, the marketplace, or where you live—but knowing how you define it should determine how you manage it. It is overly simplistic to think that home economics deals exclusively with making cupcakes or jam. It is the serious effort toward creating a management system that works to support the needs of your home.

For me, this includes working in and with seasons, putting up the harvest, avoiding packaging, and cooking my meals from the “stores” I have at season’s end. It includes doing without or making do by repairing, mending, and being grateful for the blessings I have been given, and, of course, being frugal—radically frugal. But it also means living in community with what I call the “new farm family,” that distillate of days gone by when generations lived and worked together to care for each other, and an ethic and lifestyle I embraced following my time as a small-business owner.

Running a business these days requires the sort of branding and niche marketing that can feel more competitive than cooperative. Besides that, as a one-time small-business owner, I know how beholden we are to institutions (banking, insurance, etc.) and goods that either come from, or are regulated by, international markets or organizations. Moreover, if you calculate the amount of carbon used on the build-outs and equipment required to launch and run most businesses, you’ll quickly understand how unsustainable “local” can be.

Still, I understand the theory of “buy local.” Shopping locally allows our dollars to circulate more within the community, and to support the people and businesses we care about. But this is no panacea, particularly when attempting to live within your budget.

As I like to point out, many people are lucky to be earning $15 an hour, but we are living in a $100-an-hour world. Every time we step out and into the marketplace, we are faced with the costs of goods and services that have outpaced our income.

I’m not advocating for cheaper goods, however. We haven’t been paying the true cost of anything for quite some time. Still, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know where living outside your income will lead. We can’t spend money we do not have to support local businesses, but if we don’t take part in the local economy, we tend to feel guilty.

Which is why, when a friend of mine still running a small business once told me, “Your frugality is killing my business,” I was heartsick. I knew what she was saying. It is not easy to be a business owner these days, but I’m very careful with my “disposable” income, and, well, with a planet begging for limits to growth (or no growth), I can’t help wondering when we will begin to take it seriously, and how we will respond.

One of our responses can be the type of collective living that this new farm family implies. And yet, we moderns have become addicted to an ethos of independent living, uprooting ourselves from our home communities to chase better jobs or schools elsewhere. We do not “need” each other as we once did. Our modern anything-anytime consumer culture has made our need to rely upon others near-obsolete.

This is why living collectively seems such a challenge. Mired in the mindset of independence, collective living is seen by many as primarily a means to keep rent cheap, which makes it fickle, temporary, and resistant to the larger commitment of turning down the heat on this capitalist monster. Without asking or learning the functional and emotional skills necessary to live in a home economy, our experiment in collectivity will do little to effect permanent change.

In speaking of farm families, however, I admit to waxing poetic on a lifestyle that, from a historical perspective, was more complex and compromised. Farmers were victimized, in the Great Depression and afterward, as the capitalist system demanded bigger economies of scale. “Get big or get out” was the call, and many farmers perished in attempting to take it on. More soberly, many landowners in this romanticized past were responsible for the displacement and genocide of cultures that only today we are willing to acknowledge, even if we’re not doing more than speaking about it.

But survival is an impartial taskmaster. The plight of the immigrants coming to America isn’t pretty. Neither is the story of slavery or genocide or the feeding frenzy of those who came from England to gain access to land and resources for the crown. Dang it if Jefferson’s “nation of farmers,” a rallying cry for many small farmers today, has not been overly simplified for easy reading.

But there is a movement of young farmers returning to the land, and they, too, are attempting the audacious act of living outside the tethers of the capitalist system. This makes us bedfellows in a movement, which is what home economics is really about: an effort to stand up against an economy that is doing its best to steal the best this life has to offer, a place to call home, in both form and function.

But believing in the virtues of a home economy will not magically change our values, nor will it immediately bestow the skills or intention for living in the seasons or turn us into people who would rather make, repair, sow, grow, or stow our foods than buy them from the store.

And it will not immediately turn us into capitalist refuseniks, or even someone who wants to save whatever resources and time we have to support the efforts of young farmers.

But with time, our lives as consumers in the capitalist economy will appear frail when compared to a life in the home economy. And eventually, we’ll come to understand that this is about more than making cupcakes. A lot more.

 

 

Original article here

 

 

 

01 Sep 2022
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September Artist of the Month: Thomas Hudspeth

 

 

About the Artist:

With so much biodiversity in North Carolina, it’s fun to go outside and encounter nature’s constant offering of interesting and beautiful surprises. A daily routine started a few years ago as a strategy to “get my steps in,” to move my body, and to connect with nature. A windfall was that it also became an artistic endeavor when I started taking pictures along the way.

Self-taught, I’ve noticed over time some improvement as a photographer. I’ve learned to give more attention to various perspectives, distances, angles, color, lighting, as well as “the macro and the micro.” That said, I don’t suspect I’ll ever pursue high tech photography—it’s just my simple iPhone camera and Mother Nature collaborating.

This artistic endeavor is an outgrowth of other experiences. I was a classroom teacher throughout the 1990’s and well into the 2000’s, an experience that piqued in me an interest in human development and holistic well-being. Those years led to marriage, a growing family, and my ongoing vocation as Life Coach.

Daily outings to observe nature, to take pictures, and to share them have been part of my exploration in the art of authentic living, another topic that allures me. Sharing the pictures in social media has put me in touch with other artists, nature lovers, and many kind people. I imagine that everyone at their core is an artist, a conduit through which the universe can reveal, express, and celebrate itself in endless, unique forms.

 

Connect with Thomas:

Website – CollaborateWithThomas.com

Email – CollaborateWithThomas@gmail.com

Twitter: @Collabor8tor

Rumble: Collaborate With Thomas (videos coming soon)

 

 

 

 

01 Aug 2022
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August Artist of the Month: John James Park

 

 

About the Artist:

I am a self-taught artist working in Scotland, using the following media:

  • Oils
  • Acrylics
  • Mixed Media- combinations of everything

The objective of my art is to make people happy.

My themes are based on reflections in time, space, nature, or pure abstractions of life.

The most important characteristic of my art is my reflection of the things that make me happy visually from day to day.

My artistic style creates form & function using paint & mediums to create more of a sculptural appearance than a photographic experience.

Fine detail is not required to create what you are trying to portray about your subject matter, the abstracted image should take the observer beyond fine detail into a state of being at the focal point of the image.

My main point of communication to my viewers is to always enjoy what you see in my images.

 

 

 

 

01 Jun 2022
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June Artist of the Month: Elizabeth Cox

 

 

 

Artist Statement:

Inspired by light, color, and nature. Elizabeth realized at a young age that art and creating was her passion, her calling.

Graduating with a degree in Graphic Design, she commenced working at an advertising agency in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Elizabeth enjoyed city life, but an opportunity arose to travel across Canada and throughout the United States with fellow artists. This adventure provided her with invaluable artistic insights and enriching life experiences. Upon return to Canada, she settled in a smaller town in Northern Ontario. Here Elizabeth started a successful illustration studio called Illustratus, displaying her artistic diversity by creating illustrations and design for businesses such as Pet Smart as well as fine art commissions for collectors such as NHL hockey players.

Several years later, on a meditation retreat in New York, a momentous event occurred that profoundly shifted her artistic focus from fine detail work to painting, with a sense of uninhibited freedom.

Elizabeth now paints in thick oils with an impressionistic vigor, aspiring to rouse an awakening or emotion in her viewer; to feel the joy in the vivid colors and subjects.

Elizabeth’s work has been exhibited in Northern Ontario, Vancouver, and Victoria, British Columbia. Her work has also been featured in several magazines, most recently in ‘Women in Art 278’ and Art Quench Magazine, Masters Edition.

Elizabeth’s themes are those that resonate with her inner passions and reflect her deep appreciation for nature. Subjects that make her smile or inspire a sense of awe often bring her into the studio for 8 to 15 hour days. From driving down a country road and seeing a breathtaking field of sunflowers to the way the light sparkles on a koi pond, for Elizabeth, inspiration is everywhere.

Connect with Elizabeth:

Website: www.elizabethcoxfineart.com

Instagram: @lizcox_art

Twitter: @ecox_artist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

28 May 2022
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Remember Your First Time?

The first time I put up a one person show, I didn’t know what I was doing.

The first time I taught a workshop, I didn’t know what I was doing.

The first time I gave a sermon at the Church of the Pacific, I didn’t know what I was doing.

I learn by doing and hopefully, each time I get better.

I remember the evening I previewed LOVELAND, my one-person show at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco. The lead character, Frannie Potts, was incredibly challenging to perform.

Within 5 minutes of stepping on stage, I realized how limited my acting abilities were for Frannie. I couldn’t embody the emotional range required by the words I had written. I didn’t know what I was doing. Frannie sounded harsh and off putting, one note only. I could feel the audience recoil.

The next 75 minutes were excruciating. Minutes would go by of pin drop silence, a comedian’s worst nightmare. I couldn’t wait to get off stage.

Immediately following the performance, a former student came up to me and said,

Ann, it was so cool to see you fail. (This student was not known for her tact.)

She was right, I failed miserably and failing sucks, especially in front of a live audience. The next day, I had a two-hour rehearsal with my director, Joshua Townshend. The next night I failed again but not as bad as the first night. Improvement!

My friend and fellow solo performer, Heather Woodbury, has this great quote regarding her creative work.

“Over time, my suck level got less and less.” 

This is what happened to me with LOVELAND. My suck level got less and less and a year later, LOVELAND won “Best Solo Show” in SF and LA.

As a storytelling teacher, I have shared this story with my students many times and I’m often requested to tell it again. I think people like hearing it because it gives them permission to suck, to make mistakes, and to grow from these so called “failures.” Ira Glass, host of This American Life, talks about this too in his video on being bad in the beginning.

Think about your own creative life. Where have you demanded perfection from yourself? Can you let yourself make mistakes? Can you acknowledge it’s all part of the creative process? We have a tendency to beat ourselves up when we “fail,” but what if instead, we gave ourselves immense credit for our willingness to put our work out into the world.

During Covid, I was unable to perform. I had to find a new way to express myself. I started making short videos and they were not very good in the beginning. I could feel the inner critic wanting to stop me at every turn, but I vowed to keep going. I knew from years of experience that the only way to beat the voice of the inner critic is to not give up and keep showing up for my art.

If you are feeling the voice of the inner critic to be overwhelming, I suggest letting it speak. Pick up the pen and ask the critic, “Why are you showing up today and what do you have to say to me?” This writing exercise is incredibly illuminating and can help you understand the relationship you have with this critic. On any creative journey, you will encounter this critic so it’s important to acknowledge it, but don’t let it stop you from achieving your goals. You can do it. You were born to create.

What helps me most when I make mistakes and “fail” is to know I’m not alone and to let myself receive support. We need each other to help us through these times.

Right now, I’m working on another one-person show, and as much as I’d like the development process to be perfect, it’s not. Writing first drafts is messy and trying out new material is always hit or miss. I have come to accept this as part of the creative process.

 

About the Author:

Ann Randolph is an award-winning writer and performer. Her current solo show, Inappropriate in All the Right Ways, has been described by The Huffington Post as “a show like no other.” Her show, Loveland, played for two years straight in San Francisco where it won the SF Weekly Award for Best Solo Show and garnered the SF Bay Critic’s Award for Best Original Script. Loveland also played to sold out audiences in LA and won the LA Weekly award for Best Solo Show.

 

Original article here

01 May 2022
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May Artist of the Month: Nathalie Arini

 

Artist Statement: Nathalie Arini

I’m a self-taught professional artist from France, specializing in acrylic (on canvas and paper), which allows me to express my inner feelings, visions, as well as other realms and the multiplicity of dimensions we are living in. I love to paint the unseen planes. I follow my intuition, trying to create beauty and harmony in colors and shapes. I also paint watercolors.

My favourite subjects are ravens, trees and the journey of soul in the infinite circle of life and death (samsara). I’m also a Tarot reader and a musician. Painting and music are linked in a subtle way: they always dance together! I’ve had many exhibitions in France and in India, from where my paintings have found collectors all over the world. Art has been my passion since childhood, and also nature, which is my temple. To me the act of creating is spiritual, it’s a meditation.

Recently I’ve also begun creating NFT art, always from my original paintings. I like to play with digital effects to create colorful trippy spaces!

Twitter    @AriniNathalie

Instagram       @arini_art_

télégram       https://t.me/NathalieArini

opensea      http://opensea.io/AriniNath

 

 

 

20 Apr 2022
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To Save a Forest, Look to the Women

Sara Inés Lara, leader of Colombia-based bird conservation organization Fundación ProAves, got her first taste of conservation’s potential more than 30 years ago. She grew up in one of the most biodiverse places in the world, seeking refuge in the forests, mountains, and pools of the Andes. Then, in 1998, she learned about the yellow-eared parrot.

It was once a common bird near her hometown and across the Colombian Andes, but its population had dwindled to a flock of 81 individuals. Captivated by the fate of the little bird, she abandoned her career as a civil engineer and, along with British ornithologist and her now-husband Paul Salaman and a group of other conservationists, founded ProAves to protect it.

With the help of nearby communities, especially local women, the group successfully fought for an end to the logging of wax palms—the bird’s nesting and feeding site—and hunting of the parrot for sport. The yellow-eared parrot was adopted as a regional emblem. Soon, the population started growing rapidly. Today, there are more than 2,800 individuals, and a couple of years ago, a flock of two dozen parrots was spotted near Lara’s hometown.

It was a huge win, and it taught Lara an important lesson: Women are instrumental in conservation. Women often feel the adverse effects of environmental degradation hardest, and their participation in ProAves’ work quickly demonstrated that they were essential to the success of community-based conservation projects. In many rural communities in Colombia, women are responsible for meeting their families’ most basic needs from nature, including water, firewood, and food—all of which become increasingly difficult as the environment suffers. But the women she encountered needed support, too.

“Many of the women I met were exhausted from childbearing, they did not have any food to feed their children, and they were desperate to have access to family planning,” says Lara.

In 2004, Lara founded Women for Conservation to increase access to public health, family planning, economic opportunities, and environmental conservation. The nonprofit organization aims to build the health of the communities bordering nature reserves, so they can be more economically independent and better able to protect their local environment. The organization runs workshops and trainings, ranging from environmental education to sustainable livelihoods and family planning, for women in 10 communities. It became independent of ProAves in late 2019, and reports that it has since directly reached more than 2,200 people, mostly women and young girls.

Women for Conservation also teaches women to produce wildlife-friendly artisan crafts to replace dependence on cattle ranching and prevent deforestation. In Puerto Pinzón, for example, as part of a broader project to protect the blue-billed curassow, the organization taught women to collect tagua nuts, the seeds of palm trees that are known as “vegetable ivory,” and to produce jewelry that they can sell on the market. Women for Conservation also encouraged the local community to ban hunting, use fuel-efficient stoves to decrease deforestation, and start a tree nursery.

Women for Conservation also runs workshops aimed at training women for careers in conservation and ecotourism.

Ninfa Estella Carinialli was the first woman forest ranger trained and sponsored by Women for Conservation and ProAves. She obtained the International Ranger Award from the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2021, and she works in the Águila Harpía ProAves Reserve, which is located in the eastern Colombian state of Guainía.

Carinialli’s first few years as a forest guard were hard. “My son drowned and my husband passed away from COVID,” she remembers. But, as it had with Lara, the forest proved a refuge. “I felt a deep sadness, but I am thankful for the memories I have with them, and for the opportunity to work in conservation, which makes me happy and fills me with peace.”

Overcoming Myths and Barriers

One of the most important—and sensitive—tasks Women for Conservation has taken on is a focus on reproduction and family planning in local communities. Lara initially had to deal with pushback from local communities. “When we started talking about family planning, we had a couple of incidents where women were severely beaten up for participating in our workshops,” she says. “I learned in a hard way that we need to present women’s empowerment not as a threat, but as a benefit for the family.”

In partnership with the reproductive and family health organization Profamilia, Women for Conservation organizes reproductive health workshops and provides family planning services. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the organization reports it has facilitated 360 contraceptive implants and 27 surgical procedures, including tubal ligations and vasectomies.

The ability to plan pregnancies becomes vital for women and girls when they can’t depend on the natural environment for basic survival needs, says Kelly Donado, who organizes logistics for the family planning brigades at Women for Conservation.

“When there’s ever-less food, jobs, and water, it scares me to think of bringing more babies into the world,” she says. “What kind of situation are we bringing them into? When girls have unplanned pregnancies, they cannot be adequate carers, and often, they’re not able to provide for their babies.”

Donado is leading a campaign in Zona Bananera, a municipality of Santa Marta, which suffers from water scarcity due to diversion for banana and palm growing. Her sister is a local nurse and has offered her home as a center for the clinics and workshops, as there are no medical clinics in the area. Ana Marquis, an 18-year-old from the area, is one of those who participated and decided to get a contraceptive implant.

“It lets me decide when to have my children,” she says in Spanish. She lost two pregnancies in recent years. “Right now, I’m looking after myself so that I can study and not have to worry about getting pregnant.”

In February 2022, Women for Conservation provided 72 women in Zona Bananera with contraceptive implants, in addition to offering cancer screenings, follow-ups, and reproductive education workshops. By the time the group’s representatives returned in March for checkups, more than 190 women and girls had added their names to the waiting list. Men also began requesting contraception from Women for Conservation, which resulted in the first vasectomy procedures in the Zona Bananera region in February 2022.

“Family planning has myriad social, economic, and environmental benefits: It improves the livelihoods and well-being of people and the planet and relieves population pressures on the natural environment, as well as on food production and water scarcity,” says Catriona Spaven-Donn, the Empower to Plan project coordinator for the British charity Population Matters, which supports Women for Conservation.

While Women for Conservation has made significant progress destigmatizing family planning, resistance remains. Marquis says her family forbid her from getting the implant until she was 18, as they have for her 16-year-old sister.

Some families believe that denying teenagers access to contraceptive resources will prevent them from engaging in sexual activity, a belief that has been widely debunked.

Women for Conservation also faced resistance from its peers in the environmental world. Lara remembers other conservation leaders telling her that working with women was nice, but it was not a priority. Whenever she spoke about the link between a growing population, increasing poverty, and environmental impacts, she was told to avoid talking about population.

That’s a trend in recent decades among development, environmental, and reproductive rights community groups. The focus is instead on sexual and reproductive health, choice, and rights of individuals, rather than addressing demographic factors.

“In the past, people wasted a lot of time stereotyping our planetary crises, asking whether the main problem is population or consumption,” says Phoebe Barnard, professor of global change science and futures at the University of Washington, and founding director of the global Stable Planet Alliance, which aims to stabilize and reduce consumption and global population. “Well, of course, it’s not either–or. It’s both. Investing in women’s education, leadership, and opportunities remains a really powerful way to bring benefits not only for women, but for families and children, nature, and the future of our whole civilization.”

Still, even the issues of reproductive health and women’s rights can be difficult to raise among poor, rural Colombian women living in communities where maternity and a large number of children are often viewed positively, and where men may feel a loss of control over women’s sexuality when women use modern contraceptives. In such contexts, contraception is sometimes seen as undermining the traditional gender roles and the stability of the couple and is therefore not trusted or not used.

What’s clear is the close tie between women’s empowerment and environmental outcomes. Recent research found that 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. The U.N. made gender equality an integral part of its Sustainable Development Goals, from equal access to education to family planning.

That link has pushed Women for Conservation beyond family planning to providing basic services to ensure Colombian women are healthy and safe. Breast cancer is the most diagnosed form of cancer in Colombia, so last year, the NGO started providing mammograms and training women on how to conduct a self breast exam. With a drastic increase in calls to domestic violence hotlines during the pandemic, Lara has also started leading workshops and education on the subject.

 

 

Original article here

 

 

 

 

01 Apr 2022
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April Artist of the Month: Anastasia Trusova

 

 

About the Artist:

I was born on 12/24/1988 in Russia.  I’ve been painting for as long as I can remember. I always knew that I would be an artist, only the direction changed: at one time I wanted to be an architect, then a sculptor, a portrait painter, an animator. As a result, I received higher education as a shoe designer and even managed to work for three years in this specialty.

My main theme is nature! I have always been surrounded by trees, fields and forests. Watch the dawn, inhale the smell of wet grass, listen to the sound of the wind. This is real happiness, and this happiness is available to everyone! We can all look at the sky, sit by a tree, even if we live in a city.

In nature there is nothing absolutely identical: each branch, each leaf is unique. It is very interesting to look at their curves, and then strive to paint on the sheet. I suffered for a long time, I had false attitudes from art school … for example, that a real artist paints only with oil, acrylic is so … for beginners, or that the tree is not blue at all, and the sky is not green at all. Not!!! Creativity is freedom! I love graphics and sculpture and painting very much. I didn’t “try” to do anything, and therefore I began to paint the way I like. I called my style: “textural-graphic impressionism”.

Why acrylic?  Acrylic has several advantages:

  • It is a real treasure for those who like to experiment!
  • It dries quickly and there are no rules from thin to thick. For me, this is very important. I also studied physics and mathematics, and the order, the sequence of significance. I love that I can paint many coats and not have to wait months for it to dry.
  • It darkens and fades! That is why it is not for beginners! You paint the picture after drying, you see another one… it is also flat, but this can be compensated for…

Yes, I am an artist.  But I am also a mother. Being a mother is my main job. This is a priority for me, I enjoy every moment with my children while they need me, so I paint when they are sleeping.

I especially like to paint while traveling. When I’m not at home, my quiet morning hours are from 04-09:00, this is my work time and I work.

Find all my social media art links here: https://linktr.ee/anastasiatrusova