Can Glossy, CGI Magazine “People” Compare To Us?

You are something broken that needs to be fixed.

At least, that’s what you’d think if you believed the messages in ads and entertainment without question. Those fantastical images show you a world supposedly far superior to your un-enhanced life, a personal utopia you can attain by credit card.

And well, look at you. Your wallet is unstylish. Your phone is out of date. Your car doesn’t have heated seats. Your hair is not volumized. Your eyelashes are not lifted and separated. Your britches don’t fit correctly. Your dream girl would reject any man who owned that ugly couch.

Life in a big, glossy ad is life as no one knows it. Kids don’t vomit on your suit in an ad. Hair is always windblown, even indoors. Potato chip bags are never crumpled. Nobody gets eczema. There’s no dog snot on the sleek car’s sparkling windows. The cat’s food is a mound of perfectly-placed kibble, not the weird doughnut of food your cat forms when she refuses to eat the food at the sides. Under-eye circles do the required disappearing act, even if they were earned by studying for the Stats final or staying up with a loved-one who vomited all night.

You know what’s more beautiful than any computer rendering of a human being?

The people in your neighborhood.

That’s right, the everyday, imperfect, flesh-and-blood human beings who shout with you at football games, and wait with you in traffic, and slip twenties to you in church when ends don’t meet, and paint your kids’ faces at the Halloween festival, and have water gun fights with you in the dorm… they are beautiful people.

You can strive and strive to achieve the ideals laid out in magazines, on TV, and throughout the internets, but a new car won’t hold your hand in a dying hour. The perfect lipstick won’t give you a terrific marriage. Your bed won’t be any warmer when you finally have thin thighs.

Things like that are found in true community.

True community is found by turning off the TV, putting down the magazines, letting go of our ideas of perfection, and investing in a brave life among our fellow humans in real time.

If you don’t know what to say to another human, this is a good start:
“I believe in you.”
“Your ideas are good.”
“You are smart.”
“Your work is so important.”
“You matter.”
“I love you.”
“Let me help you with that.”

You can do it. I believe in you.

Teri

Inspired by Sarah Harmeyer and the Neighbors’ Table Project, on Twitter: @NeighborsTable

Love and Fear in a Dangerous Time

I think about fear constantly, and I’ve come to several conclusions.

Fear is a poor substitute for true wisdom. Fear yearns to extinguish hope, limit thinking, and make sure we all “know our place.”

In my first-ever reblog, I want to share this tiny post by Flavours of Life, who posted a quote that sums up fear so beautifully.

Indy

Are your fears holding you back from following your dreams?   Let Paulo Coelho’s powerful words speak to you today and let go of your fears…..and go after your dreams… ‘My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,’ the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. ‘Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its d … Read More

via ~ Flavours Of Life ~

In Consideration of the Fear of the Dark

As a child, I was always terrified of the dark.

Darkness was this invasive, unlit world that separated you sight-wise from other people in your household. A loud and lonely visual silence.

Shiver.

When I was growing up, Mom always reminded me to turn the lights off when I left a room. As a child with a prodigious imagination, I found this challenging.

I’d stand with my hand resting on the switch for a solid hour, just trying to work up the guts to shut off the lights. I’d let my eyes drink in everything the nearest 75-watt bulb could give before I attempted to simultaneously hit the switch and try to launch myself out the room.

The dark still invaded in an instant. I was never fast enough to outrun it.

As children, our instincts are so sweetly sharp. We naturally gravitate to light, infant eyes fixed on glowing wiry filaments and warmth and bright yellow and white, and we are so uneasy when those lights go out. Too much empty air with God knows what filling it.

Put a child in her crib for the night and hit the switch, and you’ll earn a blood-curdling scream. G.E. makes millions off assuaging the instincts of little children, small green and blue nightlights, miniature beacons with the power to dispel gigantic monsters and demons and evil men.

Light clarifies how and where things truly are, the force that reveals anything hiding in the shadows like a dirty little secret.

And when it goes out? You sleep.

Light is sometimes hurtful, sometimes humiliating, and often so beautiful that three years ago, I learned everything I could about it so that I’d catch it just right when I clicked my new Nikon shutter. Sometimes it was so beautiful that I wanted to save just a little of it forever. Roses pressed in the pages of a Bible.

Fireflies in a jar.

Since I’m always the last to sleep in this house, tonight I went from room to room turning off overheads and lamps. As I stood in the den with my hand on the last switch, looking down the hall to where an Ikea lamp glowed dimly, stupidly out of place in the corner of my log bedroom, I remembered how I raced against the darkness that fell in an instant after I switched off the light as a child.

And I remembered the old trick:  put the dark at your back. Look up at your destination, that clear and shiny and cloudless pool of light at the end of the long dark hall, keep your back to the night, flip the switch, and don’t look back. Move forward.

Of course it’s a metaphor. On this day in particular, I see so much dark. I spy fearful things. Terrors in the night.

I’m watching you, world, as the lights go out one by one.

So here is my blessing. Whoever you are, wherever you are, fix your eyes on the brilliance, the brightness, the sun, the light, keep the dark at your back.

And then keep moving forward.

Philippians 4:8

Indy